A Resistance to Langue- Rereading Maxine Hong Kingston
A Resistance to Langue:
Rereading Maxine Hong Kingston
0
ZHOU,Yi
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy in English (Literary Studies)
© The Chinese University of Hong Kong January 2009
The Chinese University of Hong Kong holds the copyright of this thesis. Any person(s) intending to use a partial or whole of the materials in the thesis in a proposed publication must seek copyright release from the Dean of the Graduate School. Bibliography
Thesis/Assessment Committee
Prof. GLECKMAN Jason (Chair)
Prof. ZHANG Benzi (Supervisor)
Prof. TAY Eddie (Committee Member)
Dr. LI Guicang (External Examiner) ^university /^J N^^BRARY SYSTEM//^ Abstract
Abstract
Researchers tend to explore Maxine Hong Kingston's work from a literary or cultural perspective, focusing on issues such as themes, motifs, characters, identity, female consciousness, immigrant or diasporic concerns. Such research practices often ignore the multi-layered and multi-significance language representation in
Kingston's work. Even for those that have engaged in specific analyses of the language aspect of her writing, the discussions are often confined to the narrow scope of limited issues of stylistics or ethnographical debates. In contrast, her choice of language together with its cultural and political implications, especially her language stance, literary strategies and hidden connections with contemporary
Western thoughts and academic trends, are rarely touched upon.
The purpose of my thesis is thus to investigate the language representation in three of Kingston's works—The Woman Warrior, China Men and Tripmaster Monkey:
His Fake Book within the broad context of Asian American literary development and the trajectory of "Post-ism" evolution. My study examines the relationship between
Kingston's basic language stance and her specific writing strategies derived from her subject-position as a female Asian American writer. I argue that Kingston's language representation is innately connected to and, furthermore, influences the non-language aspects of her writing: on one hand, her non-language thinking (individual experience, aesthetic consideration and literary expression, ethnic/female
consciousness ) determines her choice of language and way of usage; and on the
other hand, Kingston has expressed through her language practice non-language
ideas and achieved non-language goals~to write the minorness of being an Abstract individual, an ethnic minority and a woman. Kingston's writing position and strategies are thus of dual nature: it resists Langue in a sheer linguistic and especially pragmatic sense, but at an extra-linguistic or non-linguistic (for instance, societal, cultural and ideological) level, it also resists Langue—with langue representing an
abstract system of domination. This is indeed a very important characteristic that
requires and merits a combined investigation of Kingston language and non-language
aspects in one discussion.
Thus my basic argument is as follows: in correspondence to some contemporary
Western thinking and developing tendency of minority literature, Kingston's
mutually interactive language stance and writing strategies share an interest in
resistance to Langue; and the three interrelated aspects of returning to the parole, to
the body and to the minor not only inscribe her resistance to langue/Langue but also
express a tendency of "becoming" and an irreplaceable "minoritarian " position in
her writing.
Key Words: Maxine Hong Kingston; resistance to langue; parole; body; minor;
Asian American Literature; becoming
3 Abstract
摘要
已有汤亭亭研究，多注重从文学、文化角度切入，探讨诸如题材、主题、人
物、身份认同、女性意识、离散现象等文题；而对汤亭亭写作多层面、多意义
的语言现象，并没有予以足够的重视。即或有的研究己涉及到其写作的语言层
面，但多就事论事——就语言谈语言，且仅限于其语言风格、翻译甚至民俗学
的讨论。至于汤亭亭语言选择的诗学问题及其文化政治蕴含，尤其是她的语言/
文学立场、策略的相互关系，乃至它们与当代西方思想学术潮流的契合关系，
至今仍是尚未触及或未能深入的话题。
本论文旨在以华裔文学发展和当代西方“后思想”的演进为基本学术背景，以
汤亭亭（《女勇士》、《金山客》、《猴王》）中的语言现象为主要研究对象，着重
考察汤亭亭的基本语言立场、策略，与她作为一位华裔女性作家基本写作立场、
策略的关系。我认为，汤亭亭的语言与“非语言”有着内在和互动关联：一方面，
汤亭亭的非语言性思考（个人体验，审美思考、表达，族裔/女性意识等，决
定了她对语言的使用；另一方面，汤亭亭又借由语言操作，表达了一些“非语言
性”乃至“反语言”意图或效果——即通过回到言语、回到身体、回到少数的书写，
“生成”了汤亭亭在个人、女性、族裔等层面独有的“少数性”。这样，汤亭亭的
写作立场、策略便具有双重性：在纯语言尤其是语用学意义上，是反语言的；
在超语言尤其是非语言学意义上，如社会、文化、意识形态意义上，也是反语
言的。而这，正是少数族裔、女性写作一个十分重要的特点；也是本论文将汤
亭亭的语言和非语言层面结合起来予以研讨的意义之所在。. Abstract
我的基本论点是：与当代某些西方思想潮流和少数文学的发展趋向不谋而
合，汤亭亭的语言立场、策略与其写作立场、策略，相互影响、促动；以回到
言语、回到身体、回到少数这三个相互关联的语言/写作姿态、方式，构成其从
狭义而至广义的共同的“反语言”倾向，“生成”其不可重复的汤亭亭“少数性”。
关键词：汤亭亭；反语言；言语；身体；少数；亚裔文学；生成
5 Table of Content
Table of Contents
Abstract 2
Table of Contents 6
Introduction 8
Chapter One: Return to the Parole 22
1.1 The Language Dilemma and Appeal of Asian American Literature 23
Language: Community, Nation and Power 24 Claiming a Right to Standard English 29 Claiming a Right to Multiple Tongues 32 Problems with Previously Mentioned Ways of Resistance 36 1.2 Kingston's Language Choice and Writing Strategies 40
Poetic Language: From Kristeva to Kingston 41 Heterogeneity: Kingston as a Bilingual Writer 44 Diversity： A New Fusion Language 51 Dialogism: From Words to Culture 58 Chapter Two: Return to the Body 73
2.1 From Parole to the Body 76
Langue, Parole, Subject 77 Deconstruction of the Subject: The Maternal Body 79 "Chora"- A Bodily Metaphor for Resistance to Langue 81 2.2 Body-Based Writing 83
Let the Body Speak 84 Female Writers, Body Consciousness 87 Kingston's Bodily and Life Experience 90 2.3 Gaze on the Body-Kingston's Body Writing on Male 93
Objectification: Seeing and Being Seen 94 Objectified Body-From Body to Flesh 96 Objectification as Alienation 99 Body's Spontaneous Resistance: Pain 103
6 Table of Content
Chapter Three: Return to the Minor Ill
3.1 Speech Act: Another View on Resistance to Langue 113
Austin: Speech Is Itself a Form of Action 113 Derrida: "Iterability" 116 Judith Butler： A Politics of the Performative 119 3.2 The Revolt of Minor Tongue: On Language Appropriation 122
Performing a "Twin Skin" 123 The Stereotypical Linguistic Reality 127 Insurrectionary Speech Act: Towards a "Parasitic’’ Language 130 3.3 One Man Play: On Minor Writing as Felicitous Political Speech-Acts? 134
A Performance of Identity Politics 136 Minor Writing: A Site for Felicitous Performance? 138 Conclusion 145
Bibliography 153
7 Introduction
Introduction
This thesis examines language representations in three of Kingston's works The
Woman Warrior, China Men and Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book in a broad
context of Asian American literary development and the trajectory of "Post-ism"®
evolution. My study focuses on the relationship between Kingston's basic language
stance and her specific writing strategies derived from her subject-position as a
female Asian American writer. I argue that Kingston's language stance interacts with
her writing strategies. More specifically, the three interrelated aspects of her
language/writing stance and strategies一to return to the parole, to the body and to the
minor~form an important characteristic of Kingston's work, which I would like to
characterize as "resistance to Langue.”� In this regard, Kingston's writing shares
with contemporary post-structuralist/post-colonial theories and Asian American
literary studies an interest in resistance to Langue.
Kingston's Writings and Related Critical Tradition
Just after the publication of Chinese American literary anthology Aiiieeeee! in 1974,
� The term is coined as a collective phrase to refer to all three theories that start with
the prefix "Post"—Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism, Postmodernism.
� In this thesis I borrow a set of Saussurean terms~Parole and Langue in the
discussion of Kingston's writings. The meaning and usage of both of these
words have expanded beyond their original context as demonstrated in Course
in General Linguistics and are often referred to in a metaphorical sense. A more
detailed discussion of these two terms will be provided later in this chapter in
the part of theoretical discussion.
8 Introduction
Maxine Hong Kingston's first novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood
Among Ghosts (1976) was released with her China Men appearing the following year.
In 1981，Kingston won the National Book Award for China Men and was the first
Asian American to win the National Book Critics Circle Award (1997) for nonfiction with The Woman Warrior. In 1989, Kingston followed the memoirs with her novel,
Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, which had earned her PEN West award for
fiction.
With the unprecedented public reception for an Asian American writer, her works, especially The Woman Warrior, have become standard in curricula across the
United States and elsewhere. Kingston and her writings have been prominently
featured in numerous studies of Asian American literature by critics such as Elaine
Kim, Sau-ling Wong, King-kok Cheung, Amy Ling, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim. With
her works' popular reception and large impact on academic and culture-at-large,
Kingston, as the first Asian American celebrity author, has paved the way for many
other succeeding Asian American writers. Amy Tan, for instance, was able to sell
paperback rights of her New York Times best-seller, The Joy Luck Club (1989) for
$1.23 million and sell film rights, which resulted in the popular Wayne Wang film
The Joy Luck Club (1993). Indeed, it is not an overstatement to suggest that Kingston
has set the trend for the many Asian American writers to come, and more importantly
has influenced the cultural politics of multiculturalism in the United States more than
any other Asian American writer.
Therefore, as arguably the most "canonical"^^ writer in contemporary Asian
� My remark on Kingston as a canonical Asian American writer is made with
9 Introduction
American literary history, studies and researches on Kingston and her works enjoy a rather long and thriving life that covers several major phases of Asian American literary studies. Many critics have raised important questions such as the immigration history, the assimilation and acculturation, the model minority status, stereotypes, gender conflicts, identity politics, ethnography and genre, most of which are interdisciplinary, encompassing theories in cultural study and literature. All the issues raised by the critics "provide historical and cultural contexts and problematize the entire notion of an Asian American canon."® Moreover, the Chinese half of the dual cultural backgrounds of Chinese American writers is also stressed. The inheritance of
Chinese culture, notably, the "misreading" and "appropriation" of Chinese elements一the icons, mythical figures, folk tales and legends"^) are often written about. Extensive efforts are made to compare the original versions of the stories and her altered versions.'
specific reference to Skenazy's discussion in Conversation with Maxim Hong
Kingston that The Woman Warrior "is the most anthologized of any living
American writer, and that she is read by more American college students than
any other living author. Students, particularly Asian American women, look to
her as a model, find themselves in her tales, seek her out with sycophantic
regularity" (Skenazy, 1998: vii).
� Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, and Amy Ling, Reading the Literatures of Asian America.
Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992), p. 1.
® Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: Form Necessity to
Extravagance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 4.
10 Introduction
During the past decade, the general trend of research has shifted from the stress on cultural nationalism and American nativity to heterogeneity and diaspora. The direction of research has been "from seeking to 'claim America' to forging a connection between Asia and Asian America; from centering on race and on masculinity to revolving around the multiple axes of ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality; from being concerned primarily with social history and communal responsibility to being caught in the quandaries and possibilities of postmodernism and multiculturalism."®
In a sense, the history of criticisms of Kingston and her works have been quite consistent with the critical trajectory of Asian American literary and cultural studies in the last decade一to rethink identity politics in light of critiques of essential ism. As
Christopher Lee has pointed out in The Asian American Object: Aesthetic Meditation and the Ethics of Writing�,Asian American Studies "assumes that infringements on difference are unethical in and of themselves and accordingly makes the recognition and preservation of diversity—in the language of cultural theory, otherness and alterity~a worthy end in and of itself.，，� The pursuit of difference has thus become a
� King-Kok Cheung, "Re-Viewing Asian American Literary Studies.，’ An Interethnic
Companion to Asian American Literature. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), p. 1.
� Christopher Ming Lee, "The Asian American Object: Aesthetic Meditation and the
Ethics of Writing." Ph.D. diss. Brown University, 2005), p. 11.
� See Introduction and Chapter One in Karen Kau-Yuan Su's UCB Phd thesis “ 'Just
Translating': The Politics of Translation and Ethnography in Asian American
11 Introduction foundational assumption in much scholarship in Asian American literary Studies.
In this research environment, I also approach Kingston's work from the perspective of pursuing difference; however, my project takes on a path that has not been frequented by the critics. While existing and emerging approaches mainly tackle Kingston's works from aspects of literature and culture, my focus is more on her language representation一for instance, language concept, position, usage and style (translation, pidgin and rhetoric). However, relevant discussion on issues of language representation is not completely unfound in past researches and criticism on
Kingston's writings. Translation from Chinese to English, for instance, had been a rather popular topic in the mid and late 90's. Dozens of papers that tackle the similar subject® more or less follow the same logic by reading "how the trope of translation seems to resonate particularly strongly with the structures of Orientalist homogenization that exoticize Asian Americans as 'Asians'".'.岁 Yet, specific
Women's Writing" for an extensive and in-depth discussion on the subject of
translation in Asian American Writing as a whole. It also has a separate chapter
contributed to the discussion of translation in Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
� See Introduction and Chapter One in Karen Kau-Yuan Su's UCB Phd thesis “ 'Just
Translating': The Politics of Translation and Ethnography in Asian American
Women's Writing" for an extensive and in-depth discussion on the subject of
translation in Asian American Writing as a whole. It also has a separate chapter
contributed to the discussion of translation in Kingston's The Woman Warrior.
� Karen Kai-yuan Su, '"Just Translating': The Politics of Translation and
Ethnography in Chinese-American Women's Writing." Ph.D. diss., University of
12 Introduction language phenomena in writing are often neglected and lack enough analysis. Even for those that have engaged in specific analyses of the language aspect of her writing, their discussions are often limited to an ethnographical debate—whether Kingston has presented a specific linguistic form as the "real" or "authentic" cultural, ethnic, and racial language of Asian American people. The poetics of her choice of language together with its cultural and political implications are rarely touched upon.
Purpose and Basic Argument
The purpose of my thesis is thus to investigate language representation in three of Kingston's primary works - The Woman Warrior, China Men and Tripmaster
Monkey: His Fake Book, and analyze its connection with her writing stance and strategies as a female Asian American writer. More specifically, the questions I wish to raise and in turn solve in this thesis include: What are the characteristics of
Kingston's language in these works? What is the dominating language stance/strategy demonstrated in her language representation? What kind of relationship exists between this language stance/strategy and Kingston's writing stance/strategy~or say, her subject-position as a writer? Does the former influence the latter or vice versa? Or rather is it an interplay of influence on each other? What effect does this relationship bring forth and what does it reveal about Kingston's view toward her surrounding world (literary, cultural, societal and etc.)? And what does it say about Asian American literary studies as a whole?
Specifically, my arguments are as follows: Kingston's language representation is innately connected to and under the mutual influence of "non-language" aspects. On
California, Berkeley, 1998), p. 4.
13 Introduction one hand, her non-language thinking (individual experience, aesthetic consideration and literary expression, ethnic/female consciousness®) determines her choice of language and way of usage; and on the other hand, Kingston has expressed through her language practice "non-language" ideas and achieve "non-language" aims~to write the minomess of being a individual, an ethnic minority and a woman.
Kingston's writing position and strategies are thus of dual nature: It resists
Langue in a sheer linguistic sense; but at an extralinguistic level, it also resists
Langue—with langue representing an abstract system of domination. It is indeed a very important characteristic shared by women and ethnic minority writings. Thus it is of particular value to connect the language and non-language aspects in one discussion.
Since my study of language representations in Kingston's writing is related to various issues of power struggles among multiple and assorted forces ranging from languages to individuals, society, ideologies and institutions, I favor Ferdinand de
Saussure's linguistic and cultural theories that enable me to address such relationships in a wide critical perspective. Because my study strives to negotiate a dynamic assemblage of issues as they are related to language, culture and politics in
� Specific examples of how these aspects will be connected to her choice of
language will be elaborated and detailed discussed in the following chapters.
For instance, the first chapter deals with how Kingston's representations of
language use reveal a heightened consciousness of the way Asian Americans are
perceived and represented by the dominant Anglo American culture, as well as a
successful attempt to counter such representations.
14 Introduction
Asian American Literature, I adopt a critical methodology that draws from approaches and theories from a number of areas, which include translations studies, linguistics, postcolonial and post-structuralist theories. Saussure's ideas about parole and langue, and the criticisms and attempted revisions on his concepts, however, will be the central focus of my study and will be discussed in relation to other issues in the following chapters.
Theoretical Platform: From Langue to Resistance of Langue
Resistance to Langue is my summary of one of the important trajectories of contemporary western thoughts, philosophical developments—especially that of contemporary French school of thoughts. I interpret it as revision as well as resistance to Western logo-centrism, especially various language and structural oriented Isms with Saussure as one of its representatives.
In a strict sense, the division between parole and langue was not first brought up by Saussure. As early as the first half of 19 century, Humboldt had already raised the way of dividing parole from langue. It is in the early century, when offering an introductory course to general linguistics, that Saussure further distinguished between langue and parole and treated this concept as the foregrounding premise and foundation for modern linguistics.
Specifically, Saussure deemed what we considered as language is “a system of signs that express ideas." It may be divided into two components: langue and parole.
Langue is "linguistic structure," referring to "the rules of (a) language,” the "abstract system of language that is internalized by a given speech community.”� Linguistic
� Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. Beijing: China Social
15 Introduction
Structure is only one part of language, even it is an essential part. Another important property of Langue is its homogeneity: "While language in general is heterogeneous, a language system is homogeneous in nature. It is a system of signs in which the one essential is the union of sense and sound pattern, both parts of the sign being psychological.’， �Based on this consensus, Saussure even believed that among all these concreted Langues there exists a more prevalent homogenous language for the whole human kind and it is what specifically engender the concept of a "language system structure" in general.
Parole is the speech of the individual person, the individual acts of speech, and the "putting into practice of language." It is different from langue as it is heterogeneous-that is to say, composed of unrelated or differing parts or elements. It is a dynamic, social activity in a particular time and space. In this sense, parole is what is experiential, what carries individual, particularities as well as heterogeneous.
Therefore, according to Saussure, "The linguist must take the study of linguistics structure as his primary concern, and relate all other manifestations of language to it.，， �In other words, the real object of linguistics is langue but not parole; and the mission of the science of linguistics is to establish the foremost importance of langue inside language.
The divide between parole and langue has great impact on succeeding development in linguistics and structuralism. For instance, several structuralist
Science Publishing House, 1960)，p. 9.
� Ibid., p. 14.
� Ibid.，p. 9.
16 Introduction
linguistic schools, such as Prague school, Copenhagen school and Moscow school, are all in one way or other influenced by Sassureian linguistic ideals to study and analyze langue instead of parole. American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, Chomsky are also influenced by Saussure to treat langue but not parole as the object of their studies.
On the other hand, Saussure's emphasis on the distinction between langue and parole and exclusion of parole from the field of linguistics has beget many criticisms.
Many scholars such as Bally, Guillaume and Pettier, Harris and Greimas are not satisfied with the prioritizing of phonetics and structure; and they have attempted to give parole, and discourse, a legitimate status in their studies. Since the 1970’s， parole and discourse have enjoyed a relatively independent status as the object of linguistic researches particularly in the fields of pragmatics and discourse analysis.
Indeed, the Saussurean prioritizing of langue over parole within the whole linguistic and structuralism tradition has been seriously challenged, nearly in all post-isms such as post-structuralism and post-colonialism. French poststructuralists like Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, for instance, have argued repeated that it is necessary to resist and to deconstruct “langue.” They try to topple down Saussurean myths about langue, structure and identity, and endow parole as well as difference with their long deserved recognition and legitimacy.
However, to fully evaluate the concepts of parole and langue, their influence is in no sense the central focus of my thesis. Besides, although I see eye to eye with
Saussure's divide of human language into langue and parole '' and consider it as the
� To be more specific, I see the trichotomy of langue-discourse-parole as the three
17 Introduction
founding concept of my central argument, what I wish to bring out in my study is the
drive that lies underneath Saussure's divide of langue and parole-the structural
orientation and logo-centrism—the worship for unity, monologism, homogeneity.
Such worship shares innate connections with Western mainstream metaphysics, ideas
and ideologies.
Poststructuralist reflection and criticism of Saussurean tradition have also enlightened me greatly in terms of methodologies adopted in this thesis. In fact, when ethnic minority writers write in the dominant tongue, they face pressures from
language in both its narrowest and broadest sense. There are pressures from the mainstream English world concerning commonly adopted rules, standards and even basic criterion concerning language values, including their standards and attitudes toward ethnic minority writers, and in particular, the cultural and ideological restrains these writers adopt through dis/re-placement. The divide between langue and parole, therefore, has more practical meanings than metaphorical implications for minority writers. In this sense, minority writers, especially female writers, are
inheritably trapped in the struggle between langue and parole. As for a minor," or to be exact, a minority writer, the drive and appeal for a revolt against langue are innate and essential.
Organization of Chapters
Maxine Hong Kingston, as demonstrated through her writing of The Woman
Warrior, China Men and Tripmaster Monkey, takes what can be described as a resistance to langue as her basic writing stance and strategy by returning to parole,
basic layers of human language, and the foundation concept of this thesis.
18 Introduction retrieving the body and re-establishing the minor. The chapters are carefully organized so that the central topic of resistance to Langue in Kingston's writings may be examined from these three different perspectives. One thing worth noting is that although each chapter focuses only on one particular aspect of Kingston's writing stance and strategy, the three aspects are actually interconnected and work together to form a complete system of writing as resistance.
In Chapter One, linguistic and historical approaches help me examine the self-representations of language practices by several Asian American writers such of
Amy Ling and Hawaiian poets as various representative attempts of returning to the parole. I argue that their self-representations reveal a self consciousness regarding the way these writers are being perceived and represented by the dominant
Anglo-American culture and a desire to counter such representations. Critical attention, therefore, focuses on the various methods adopted by these writers and their succeeding problems in terms of their resistance. I in turn argue how Kingston's practice of returning to parole as demonstrated in The Woman Warrior avoids these problems and functions as an effective way of resistance by aspiring to non-mimic and non-referential aspect of language. The argument is further developed by my discussion of the generative nature of her language poetics.
From the subject of linguistic representation in Kingston's writings, Chapter Two shifts to the question of body-writing. Based on Julia Kristeva's theory of poetics, my discussion highlights the inner logic between poetic language and the return to the body, and its connection with resistance to langue. I combine the theoretical framework with relevant discussions on Kingston's China Men from the perspective of body narration to provide in-depths analyses of her writing strategy of returning to
19 Introduction the body. I argue that to return to the body, especially to the female body, is a natural choice for Kingston's resistance to langue. This choice, in a sense, a logical extension and a natural continuation of "returning to the parole"; and it suggests a means of resistance based on female intuitions and self-consciousness-when the body starts to speak, all "symbols," and all "systematic languages" pale and languish in front of the body and the "signs" written by the body. To return to the body is thus a more powerful way of resistance to langue.
Finally, I turn to the concept of minor writing as a speech act in Chapter Three.
Following J. L Austin's speech act theory that speech is itself a form of action, I argue for an implicit idea within Kingston's writing that excessive uses of language can rework not only language rules but also existing social codes. Situating my discussion of Tripmaster Monkey in a broad context of Asian American studies, I read Kingston's work as an allegory of the dilemma faced by Asian American writers, which reveals a fissure between their intellectual pursuits and identity politics. The ultimate solution to the dilemma, as I contend, lies in the act of returning to the minor. In the case of Kingston, to return to minor means to underwrite the resistance to langue and to other dominant systems. Kingston's writing serves as an example to illustrate how literature can generally supplement and, indeed, change life.
‘Just to name a few of the important works of criticism that deal extensively with three of the primary texts I used in this thesis: Elaine Kim's Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the
Writings and Their Social context, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong's Reading Asian American Literature:
From Necessity to Extravagance, King-kok Cheung's Articulate Silence: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine
Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa and Amy Ling's Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry and etc..
2 The meaning of minor varies as it is used in different contexts. For instance, in my first chapter's
20 Introduction
discussion on the parole, minor is used very much like Venuti's definition of minority as he
contemplates the concept and tries to determine its relationship to the study and practice of translation
in the "Introduction" to the Translation and Minority issue of The Translator. As Venuti expresses it.
‘ his focus in this essay is "on the distinctive forms translating takes when done by or on behalf of
minorities" (135). He draws from Deleuze and Guattari's Kajka: Toward a Minor Literature to help
him conceptualize and express this relationship. In their poststructuralist theories of language and
textuality, Deleuze and Guattari identify three characteristics of minor literature: 1) the
deterritorialization of language, 2) the connection of the individual with political immediacy, and 3)
the collective assemblage of communication. Armed with these concepts, Venuti defines minority as a
subordinate cultural or political position, a position that may be occupied by nations or social groups
whose languages and literatures are underrepresented, marginalized, and stigmatized. Translation as
Venuti continues to explain that, by definition, is a minor use of language in which the translator tries
to communicate the marginal or foreign into a translating culture. Thus, in this thesis "minor" is a
broad and inclusive terms: it carries the implication of heterogeneous, nonstandard, and inconstant and
most importantly marginal.
21 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
Chapter One Return to the Parole
We hear words—the Word— words—and they come into our bodies, into
our ears, and then we find a way to transmit it into the written word. I want
everything that I hear to get into the way that I write, oh, like the way 1
become poetry, oral. Everything that I write I say it aloud.�
-Maxine Hong Kingston
Although langue is a main object of study for the science of linguistics, parole is arguably the true essence of literature'. Every process of serious, genuine, creative and thoughtful literary creation could essentially be read as an act of returning to the
Parole. To recuperate parole in one's language is of particular importance to ethnic minority writers, especially to female ethnic minority writers. Foremost of all, the innate richness and generative power of the parole enable female ethnic minority writers to transcend from the restraint of language-it is through this act of deterritroialization of the most literal as well as broadest sense, one is able to recuperate the liveliness and freedom of the tongue.
More importantly, through writing as a returning to parole-- the individual acts of speech, the hierarchical relationship between heterogeneity and homogeneity,
� Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, Reading Asian American Literature: Form Necessity to
Extravagance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 162.
22
1 Chapter One: Return to the Parole representation and structure, monism and polyphyletism are open to subversion. The world that has once being "formatted" by monologues represented in the form of law, order, system regains its individualness and richness through a process of
"un-formatted." Specifically, for Kingston and other Asian American writers, their shared strategies in writing as subversion is to seek for the particularities and uniqueness of one's own cultural and ethnical experience, and to be able to speak from the perspectives of such experiences.
In this chapter, a picture of language pressures (linguistic, cultural, ideological) faced by Asian American writers and literature and their choice of parole, either as a self-conscious or inevitable act, will first be presented. Using it as a background, I wish to provide my interpretation of Kingston's choice of language, especially its language's poetic referent!ality, through ideas and insights provided by Kristeva's poetic language theories.
1.1 The Language Dilemma and Appeal of Asian American Literature
The language dilemma^ and appeal of Asian American writers and literatures come from their usage of English as their working language as well as from all the rights and powers attached to the language itself; not only so, it also includes the structural and orthodox power that is derived from mainstream society and ideologies.
When the latter two are combined together, they create language pressures on Asian
American writers.
In this sense, from the founding day of Asian American literature, writers are consciously or unconsciously engaged in language struggles striving to breakthrough from the besiegement of the langue. One of its basic appeals is to return to the parole,
23 Chapter One: Return to the Parole to use parole itself to resist against all other alienating forces of langue, and to obtain the power of discourse, the right of individual and races, and even the rights to live and to be treated like human beings. Yet, in order to clearly analyze their specific appeals, one must first turn to a general question of how language-langue and parole functions in relation to the formation and evolvement of Asian American communities and, in turn, its literatures.
Language: Community, Nation and Power
Asian American literature is first of all a literature of the diaspora, a literature of ethnic minorities. Its main subject is immigrants and descendents of the disaporic land. Its writing drive and content are in someway or the other spiritually and physically interrelated with immigrant communities.
The following is one definition of "community" given in Contemporary Asian
American Communities:
Our collective perspective therefore envisions communities as both
territorial sites or geographically delineated formations and socially
constructed entities; as such, these communities are based on relations of
similarities and differences and on relations that extend to multiple networks
across locations and interest®.
From the above definition, one can see that Asian American community cannot
® Linda Trinh V6, and Rick Bonus, Contemporary Asian American Communities'
Intersections and Divergences (Philadelphia Temple University Press, 2002), p.
4.
24 Chapter One: Return to the Parole easily be categorized, as it must be understood from various perspectives and aspects.
Limited by the length of this thesis, the relationship between communities and language will be my foremost concern in this chapter. Taken together this fact and the central discussion focus of my thesis, I would like to define community in terms of its relation to language as a signifying system. A community is necessary to establish the order of the signifying system and a signifying system is necessary to establish the order within a community or society, as Catherine Belsey observes in
Critical Practice:
Social organization and social exchange, the ordering of the processes
of producing the means of subsistence, are impossible without the existence
of a signifying system. Language therefore comes into being at the same
time as society.�
According to Stuart Hall, a society or culture becomes unified through the establishment of "shared conceptual maps, shared language systems and the codes which govern the relationships of translation between them，’�(original emphasis).
Through the social conventions of their culture, members learn and internalize the established codes of their community so that they can both exchange and interpret ideas with other members through language communicationl
�Belse Catheriney , Critical Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 1988)，p.
42.
�Stuar Hallt , Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices,
(London, UK & Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997), p. 21.
25 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
However, based on post-colonial theories, there also exists a power relationship
between Asian American community and nation. Between the American nation — a
dominant culture—and Asian American community-a subjugated culture there is an
asymmetrical relationship. This power relationship, from my point of view, is often
represented apparently or subtly through language and literature. In this sense,
although there are obvious differences between the contexts of Asian American
literature and postcolonial writings, some of the postcolonial theories and
methodologies, especially those about nation and power discourse, are indeed
applicable to analyses of Asian American literature and communities.
From early Chinese immigration in the middle of the century to Pan-Asian
immigration through the century, white America relegated Asians and Asian
Americans to a position in which they were "a unique, transnational industrial
reserve army of migrant laborers forced to be foreigners forever"; Ronald Takaki
borrows the sociological term "internal colony，,� to characterize them further, in this way, regardless of individuals' current socioeconomic positions, Asian Americans
as a racial and cultural minority have inherited a history of economic, social, cultural,
and political disenfranchisement that has been enacted against them by the dominant,
Eurocentric power structure. Such a history, as my considerations of the postcoloniality of Asian American literature goes, is demonstrated not only in its thematic contents but also as a wrest of control over language from the dominant culture.
The language pressure faced by Asian American writers is multi-layered whether
� Ron Takaki, Strangers From Another Shore (New York, NY: Penguin, 1989)，pp.
21-99.
26 Chapter One: Return to the Parole one is writing in an "acquired" tongue or not. Although there is no uniform or static depiction of English within the breadth of American literature, writers especially
Asian American ones, by using English are inevitably inherent participants within a recognizably standardized aesthetic form. They experience pressure from both their immediate cultural and linguistic community and the mainstream literary audiences to adhere to comfortable and familiar structure of language and form. Such pressures are often presented in the form of prejudice and dissonance coming from mainstream culture and society towards Asian American and their writings. For instance, early white writers depicted Asian—mainly Chinese-immigrants, at the turn of the 20th century, as the "unassimilable aliens" and perpetual foreigners." As their physical,
Asian traits coded as foreign are generally associated with inability to speak and write intelligible and "qualified" English, there is an inevitable tension between their perceived foreignness and their actual Americanness.
Specific representation of the pressure is often manifested in much of Asian immigrant writings through a shared theme of the crisis of identity. Especially as more and more second generation Asian American writers begin to compose and publish their own works, conflicts relating to cultural and national identities become their foremost thematic concerns. From Pardee Lowe's Father and Glorious
Descendent (1943) to Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston 's Farewell to Manzanar (1973), the internal struggles of individual Asian American writers or their characters over the extent of their Asianness of Americanness often find external manifestation in their questioning or rejecting the language and culture of their first generation parents. The particular dynamic demonstrated by writers attempting to represent these struggles in written form is of particular interest. As these writers grapple with thematic issues of cultural insecurity and misunderstanding, they often choose to give this material
27 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
representation in language representations of characters in their texts, especially when depicting the miscommunication, resentment, and shame that typify many relationships between immigrant parents and their American born children.
Therefore, the attempt to voice one's self-to resist against the pressure of
language and especially the rights to raise dissonance through speaking becomes one of the inevitable choices as well as long-term appeal of Asian American writers. The focus of my discussion in this chapter will then shift to how these writers employ various methods of resistances under the language pressure they faced. Concerning this question, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin's famous discussion on postcolonial writings' use of "language of the center" may provide us with a few insights.
In their groundbreaking book The Empire Writes Back, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and
Tiffin argued：
The crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that post-
colonial writing define itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-
placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place. There are two
distinct processes by which it does this. The first, the abrogation or denial of
the privilege of 'English' involves a rejection of the metropolitan power over
the means of communication. The second, the appropriation and
reconstitution of the language of the centre, the process of capturing and
remoulding the language to new usages, marks a separation from the site of
colonial privilege.�
� Bill Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Post-colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 38.
28 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
Exactly in the process of "capturing and remoulding the language to new
usages," Asian American writers' resistance and breakthrough of language start with
claiming a right to standard English or any other standard language.
Claiming a Right to Standard English
The rendering of Asian English in print has had a long and intimate history with
American popular literary forms. From Alonso Delano' Western plays (1850，s) to
Bret Hart's "The Heathen Chinee" poem, (1870) to Wallace Irwin's Hashimura Togo
serialized columns (1900-1920) to Earl Derr Biggers' Charlie Chan novels (1930，s), white American writers' representation of Asian characters' inability to command
English have been a hallmark of American humor which caricatures immigrants.
Among these literary representations, one dichotomized stereotype of Asians in
Anglo-American literature is the bad Asian and the good Asian：
The "bad" Asians are the sinister villains and the brute hordes, neither of
which can be controlled by the Anglos and both of which must therefore be
destroyed. The "good" Asians are the helpless heathens to be saved by
Anglo heroes or the loyal and lovable allies, sidekicks and servants. In both
cases, the Anglo-America portrayal of the Asians serves primarily as a foil
to describe the Anglo as "non-Asian": when the Asian is heartless and
treacherous, the Anglos is shown indirectly as imbued with integrity and
humanity; when the Asian is a cheerful and docile inferior, he projects the
Anglo's benevolence and importance...A common thread running through
these portrayals is the establishment of and emphasis on permanent and
irreconcilable differences between the Chinese and the Anglos, differences
29 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
that define the Anglo as superior physically, spiritually, and morally.®
These stereotypes work to reinforce the perceived threat or inferiority of Asians through the characters' represented language use. The Asian villain's "fluent command of English makes his cruelty all the more chilling," for “[b]eneath the polite formalities of educated speech beneath the thin veneer of civilization,' lurks a monster of immorality only pretending to be human."® Conversely, the unsuccessful attempts of docile and ineffectual Asian characters to master English entertained a popular readership. Typified by invented words, verbose dialogues, and exaggeratedly honorific speech, language caricatures of these good Asians are often the laughing stocks and punch lines in these writings.
These two distinctively different representations of Asians reveal a bifurcated attitude among these white Americans and writers. The sarcastic language representations of good Asians support some white Americans' view of Asians as culturally laughable and intellectual inferior. The almost native-1 ike linguistic depiction of bad Asian, however, is a continuation of previous fear and concerns.
Asians were viewed then as a relatively new nonwhite group that would further disrupt American society一a presupposed all-white racially homogenous system, compounding the "problem" already posed by Indians and blacks. Driven by this common/shared ideology that promoted the reservation of American culture as they
� Elaine H. Kim, Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and
Their Social Context (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1982), pp.
4-5.
� Ibid, p. 12.
30 Chapter One: Return to the Parole perceived it, white thus sought ways to restrict non-white influence and acceptance.
For Asian immigrant communities, the white society's prevailing attitude towards foreignness, which engendered the above mentioned kinds of literary stereotypes, fueled the push for closed-door immigration policies, anti-miscegenation laws, educational/vocational restrictions, and most significantly, Standard American
English, Language standardization is in a sense associated with the preservation of mainstream Caucasian-centered culture. White Americans feared that American
English would break up into dialects that would eventually cause the language to become incomprehensible. They turned to perceive language experts and guardians to validate Standard American English as the authoritative form of English to be spoken and accepted. In turn, deviations from the standard would result in marginalization, and non-proficient speakers of Standard American English would be denied access to opportunities that would raise their social, political, and economic status.
The competing ideologies posed by language standards and identity politics are explored in many literary texts by Asian American writers. For example, in Wild
Meat and the Bully Burgers, Lois-Ann Yamanaka illustrates the practice of inculcating Hawaiian children of many different ethnicities and class backgrounds with an ideology of standardization that denigrates them based on their cultural and socioeconomic situation. Other examples can also be found in the early literature written by foreign diplomats, exchange students, and scholars who were highly educated, very wealthy, and proficiently bilingual. Among these were Lee Yan
Phou's When I was a Boy in China, published in 1887; Etsu Sugimoto's A Daughter of the Samurai, 1925; Younghill Kang's East Goes West, 1937; and Lin Yutang's My
31 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
Country and My people, 1937. Although their privileged backgrounds and English language abilities enabled them to write and publish in the U.S., these early writers were not representative of the general population of Asian immigrants during the beginning of the twentieth century. Seeking to smoothly initiate a shift in the Western view of Asians from that of unwanted foreigner to immigrant citizens, these writers straddled their bicultural identities and hoped to gain acceptance as exceptionally cultured individuals distinct from the largely illiterate and unassimilable Asian immigrant working class.
Claiming a Right to Multiple Tongues
Following the Civil Rights and Vietnam War protests and movements of the
1960's, some Asian American writers and literary critics spearheaded a new Asian
American consciousness which promoted political, cultural, and literary awareness and activism. Their consciousness of structural restrains set on them by the mainstream, orthodox English and literary worlds underscores their claim for the rights to articulate their identities through their own voices.
One such group of writers include Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson
Fusao Inada, and Shawn Hsu Wong, who compiled and edited an anthology of Asian
American literature in the early 1970's in order to give voice to writers who variously challenged conventional cultural and literary stereotypes of Asian
Americans. Language politics play a crucial role in the issuing of this challenge.
According to the aforementioned editors, it is the responsibility of Asian American writers "to legitimize the language, style, and syntax of his people's experiences, to codify the experiences common to his people into symbols, cliches, linguistic
32 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
mannerisms, and a sense of humor that emerges from an organic familiarity with the
experience.，，�
To legitimize the speech of Chinese Americans, for example, these writers would reclaim a "legitimate mother tongue，”� something which white American
literature and culture have denied for so long: "Only Asian Americans are driven out of their tongues and expected to be at home in a language they never use and a culture they encounter only in books written in English. This piracy of our native tongues by white culture amounts to the eradication of a recognizable
Asian-American culture here."� Such assertions have led subsequent Asian
American writers to experiment with language representations by depicting usages which are not only non-standard but also cannot comfortably be fit into mainstream conceptions of “Asian English." Thus, in their attempts to reclaim these spoken languages that have been represented historically by white writers for humor and ridicule, Asian American writers seek to legitimize their individual paroles for the purpose of pride and identity. The challenge to this end, however, is negotiating the on-going complications of rendering spoken language within a written medium as well as the continued privileging of standard language hierarchies which shape the formation of cultural identities. Considering the various voices raised at that time, we may find two basic means of resistance: pidginization and translation.
� Chin, Frank, et al., The BigAiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and
Japanese American Literature (New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991), p.
xxxvii,
® Ibid., p. xliv.
� Ibid., p. xxviii.
33 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
(1) Pidginization
In the case of Hawai'i Creole English, language establishes a bond among users by indicating a common history, particularly a history of struggle for immigrant
laborers and native Hawaiians alike due to their subjugation and exploitation by plantation bosses and the dominant white culture. Pidgin, then, becomes not only a marker of local identity but also a tool for critiquing the dominant culture and standard American English.
Some Hawaiian writers choose to demonstrate their loyalty to pidgin-their language of "home"--not through mimicry in their work but more often through syntactic fusion or vernacular transcription. These representational strategies enable them to experiment of varying degree with the visual field of the textually represented language so that the materiality of its presence must be constantly confronted and negotiated by readers.
In their poems and short stories, for example, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Darrell Lum and Bradajo (Jozuf Hadley) simultaneously reject and engage conventional literary aesthetic, linguistic, and formal standards so as to define Hawaiian literature, and position it within American literary history. Moreover, while pidgin in these works can be analyzed as a site of protest, it also serves to redirect readers' expectations of literary texts, thus refashioning readers' relationship to the texts in ways that require them to respect the materiality of words rather than take them for granted. Through representations that attempt to translate the aural and rhythmic qualities of pidgin into written form, these writers aspire to perform an act of cultural preservation which are both self-defining and community-building.
The disruption of conventional literary standards enacted by Yamanka, Lum,
34 Chapter One: Return to the Parole and Bradajo through their language choices ranges from moderate to extensive. In abrogating and approaching the language and literary forms of dominant American culture, each writer approaches the process of retooling the language to express the heterogeneity and complexity of local culture in a way that best suits his or her own particular literary style, personal experiences, and cultural outlook.
(2) Translation
Another stream is writing through translation-a way that leads to heterogeneity and polyphyleticness, as exemplified by Jade Snow Wong and Amy Tan's works.
One illustration of the act of translation that displays tensions between major and minor can be found in Amy Tan's representation of Chinglish in The Joy Luck Club.
Centering primarily on the relationship between a group of immigrant Chinese mothers and their second generation Chinese American daughters, The Joy Luck Club enacts on multiple levels the ambivalence many Asian Americans experience regarding the personal and social acceptability of their dual cultural identities. Using language as a primary site of this cultural conflict, Tan employs competing registers of standard and non-standard American English in her work, thus revealing the complicated and contradictory polycultural engagements that occur not only within personal and intergenerational relationships but also in a larger social, cultural, and literary context.
Through her representation of language in the novel, Tan both depicts and enacts forms of translation-translation of the mothers' Chinglish into a more readable and understandable pidgin, translation of the transliterated Chinese into some current forms of American English, and translation or mistranslation between characters-which extend from the language level to the central themes of the novel itself.
35 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
Problems with Such Ways of Resistance
There still exist some unsolved issues in terms of Asian American writers' struggle to return to parole. Generally speaking, Asian American writers' struggles for returning to the parole are still affected by langue thinking and paradigms -the halfway revolt of the minor tongue.
(1) The Halfway Revolt of the Minor Tongue
The disruption of conventional literary standards enacted by Hawaii poets and
Chinese American Writers like Amy Tan is worth our attention. In abrogating and appropriating the language and literary forms of dominant American culture, these writers approach the process of retooling language to express heterogeneity, complexity and diversity. Yet, their ways of writing still suffer from several faults.
One of the most significant ones is what Huang criticized in his discussion of the ethnographical tendency of Asian America writings: "Prose narrative yields an apparent isomorphism between the word and the world.”(" By pointing out the existence of "generic preference for realist, personal narrative"® in Asian American literature as well as the "current" focus on narratives in Asian America literary studies, Huang argues that for most writers as well as critics, the mediating function of language in Asian American writing is often ignored and "what remains essential in their writing and reading is still the reference to the phenomenal, extralinguistic
� Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and
Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2002), p. 105.
® Ibid., p. 105.
36 Chapter One: Return to the Parole world."®
To a certain extent, the attempts of many Asian American writers to restructure language and textual forms to reflect the authenticity of their cultural backgrounds followed the ethnographical ideal. In proposing writing authenticity, they sought to correct the misconceptions/stereotypes of "broken" English held by most Americans. Unfortunately, however, their efforts may work in the opposite direction as to function as reinforcement of stereotypes rather than correction. In the following paragraphs, I would like to discuss briefly the limitations of the two most common strategies of returning to parole adopted by
Asian American writers 一 the blending of pidgin and the use of translation. My analysis will illustrate how these strategies suffer from the relapse of langue as the writers' attempted return to parole are still influenced by langue thinking and paradigms in a broad sense.
(2) The Use of Pidgin in Hawaii Writings
The introduction of pidgin English into Hawaii writings may very well exacerbate their unassimilated situation. As Bill Ashcroft et al. pointed out, one of most significant features of pidgin in literature is that it becomes a common mode of discourse between classes:
Pidgin was inevitably used in the context of master-servant relationships
during the period of European colonization. So the social and economic
hierarchies produced by colonialism have been retained in post-colonial
society through the medium of language. Of course, pidgin remains a
� Ibid.，p. 105.
37 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
dominant mode of discourse among all non-English-speakers wherever it
exists, but its role in most literature, except that of the polydialectical
communities of the Caribbean, is both to install class difference and to
signify its presence. ®
We can see that the very act of resistance through introducing pidgin into one's writing~the local Hawaiian pidgin English, for instance, may very ironically still function as a domesticating strategy instead of a resistance. The idea of restructuring language and form of the text to reflect the authenticity of local culture expressions and practices may very well work to reinforce the stereotypes by repeating the hidden hierarchical power relations inside the pidgin. The attempt to render local speech through pidgin may also belie the versatility and variance to which this vernacular language form is continuously subjected, not to mention the logical impossibility of using a written medium to fully represent the spoken. As literary language is a material practice, each writer's representational choices differ slightly from the others' so that there is no uniform or static depiction of pidgin within the breadth of
Hawaiian literature.
(3) Writing as Translation in Amy Tan's Writing
To introduce vernacular tongue into one's writing through the act of translation is another commonly adopted strategy by Asian American writers, especially the bilingual ones, as a way of returning to parole. Yet, I would like to argue that instead as resistance, Amy Tan's way of using vernacular tongue is an appeal to an
� Bill Ashcroft, et al.，The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p.75.
38 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
English-speaking, non-Asian, mostly white reading audience. Moreover, in
Tan's writing, one may find the irresoluteness she expressed between the langue and the parole. In a sense, this irresoluteness is related to her lack of sufficient self-consciousness for the parole.
As her translation is filled with explication and glossing, she is indeed engage in a translation act as assimilation/domesticating instead of resistance. In the first chapter of The Translator i Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti defines a domesticating translation strategy as one in which the translated text reads fluently. The absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer's personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text—the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the ‘‘original.，，�
Such transparency establishes easy readability for English language readers
(the target-language reader) "by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning."® This appeal and assimilation to the target-language audience is crucial in determining that a translator has employed a domesticating strategy, for in this appeal and assimilation the translator has largely inscribed cultural difference as similarity:
Whatever difference the translation conveys is now imprinted by the
target-language culture, assimilated to its positions of intelligibility, its
� Lawrence Venuti. The Translator's Invisibility (London and New York: Routledge,
2008), p. 1. �
® Ibid., p. 1.
39 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
canons and taboos, its codes and ideologies. The aim of translation is to
bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the
familiar; and this aim always risks the wholesale domestication of the
foreign text, often in highly self-conscious projects, where translation
serves an appropriation of foreign cultures for domestic agendas,
cultural, economic, political. Translation can be considered the
communication of a foreign text, but it is always a communication
limited by its address to a specific audience•�
In the case of Tan, the extensive glossing in her cross-cultural writing leads to the necessity of dragging "an explanatory machinery，，� behind its stories. With explanatory notes, everything that happens or everything that is said is with direct imposed referent. Her writing is more like ethnography that equates every signs of
Chinese culture with a parallel referent in the West. Such a homogenization act also functions as a means of assimilation or domestication rather than resistance or subversion.
1.2 Kingston's Language Choice and Writing Strategies
Similar to other Asian American writers, Kingston also adopts the return to the parole as her basic language stance and writing position; but she is comparatively far more conscious of the necessity of returning to parole. More importantly, Kingston's
� Ibid., pp.18-19.
® Bill Ashcroft, et al., The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in
Post-Colonial Literatures (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 61.
40 Chapter One: Return to the Parole works have made significant breakthroughs in the process of searching for new means of resistance to langue by resorting to what Kristeva describes as a kind of
"poetic language.”
Poetic Language: From Kristeva to Kingston
One cannot discuss poetic language without, first of all, referring to Kristeva.
Although the term and concept of poetic language are nothing of Kristeva's own creation, her analysis of the subversive nature of poetic language is what intrigues me. In many aspects, Kingston as a writer and Kristeva as a philosopher share subtle connections such as their minor backgrounds and positions as female and "foreigner"
(--each of them even wrote an autobiographical novel with a similar title: The
Samurai by Kristeva and The Woman Warrior by Kingston). Common ground breeds similar usages and understanding of parole and langue, especially with reference to the aspects of dialogues and carnivalesque discourse. Before discussing Kingston's language choice, I wish to give a brief review of Kristeva's theory of poetic language.
In her theoretical system of poetic language, Kristeva has further developed
Saussure's original concept of signification, especially the connotative aspect of signification, by relating it to Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of dialogism. In addition, she innovatively seeks support from Lacan's theory to establish the foundation for her own interpretation language as a "signifying process" with emphasis on both systematicity and transgression in every signifying practice.
For Kristeva, the symbolic and the semiotic are the two sides of the coin of language. The former refers to the referential and communication function of language; and it is used to convey single meanings. The latter, by contrast, is what
41 Chapter One: Return to the Parole we call the material aspect of language, which includes the tempos, rhythms of language as well as its playfulness and illogicality. The semiotic works to negate the linearity and logic within the symbolic. Poetic language is created within the dialogues between the semiotic and the symbolic. The interchange and renewal of these two language forces provide parole with polyvalent meanings. Kristeva's theory of poetic language emphasizes the semiotic resistance to langue and advocates acts of speech that are based on sensibilities and difference.
In her discussion in Revolution in Poetic Language and in later work Desire in
Language, Kristeva focuses on what traditional linguistics normally excludes一"a crisis or the unsettling process of meaning within the signifying phenomena"-in order to produce a theory of signification based on the embodied speaking subject and the materialist historical process. And "by uncovering the 'disquieting' and
heterogeneous elements of signification in a variety of disciplines (especially in
linguistics, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology),"® she is concerned with the forms
of otherness and multiplicity excluded by unifying orders of discourse. She, like
Adorno, criticizes the "static formalism" of structuralism and claims that this
ahistorical formalist approach to language is encouraged by the capitalist ideology.
What Kristeva passionately advocates is a new type of linguistics that would "not
only classify the signifying phenomena but also embrace within them moments of
Ziarek, Ewa. "At the Limit of Discourse: Heterogeneity, Alterity, and the Maternal Body in Kristeva's Thought." Language and Liberation: Feminism, Philosophy, and Language. Ed. Hendricks, Christina. Oliver, Kelly. New York: SUNY Press, 1999. pp. 323-346.
42 Chapter One: Return to the Parole negativity, disruption and undecidability.，，� Her understanding of signification implies a different understanding of culture, no longer conceptualized in terms of a general symbolic system but in terms of the specificity and multiplicity of signifying practices.
In her employment of Bakhtin's theories, Kristeva mainly adopts the idea of dialogism and carnivalesque discourse to connect with issues of words and intertextuality in relation to poetic language. The American critic, Michael Holquist, in his Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, first used the term "dialogism" to summarize part of Bakhtin's theoretical thinking, meaning "a special form of interaction among autonomous and equally signifying consciousnesses.” In this sense, the word "dialogue" carries two layers of meanings: On the one hand, it refers to "a conversation carried on between two or more persons"; and on the other hand, it shares the same etymon as "dialectic," implying its two connotations: (1) it refers to a specific type of literary form, namely "Socratic Dialogue," which Bakhtin points out in his analysis in Problems of Dostoevsky 's Poetics as one of the most prevalent
Ancient Greek forms that calls for the gradual revelation of differences and contradictions through dialoging between two equally free and mutually respected
individuals; (2) the meaning of dialoging extends to the level of debates between equal subjects for the pursuit of truth, which stands for the spirit of freedom, democracy and equality. In a broad context, "dialogue" bears universal connotations and permeates into every aspects of human life. To sum up, dialogism or dialogue refers to an everlasting process of communication between equal subjects.
� Ibid., pp. 323-346.
43 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
But how does Bakhtinian concept of dialogism function within Kristeva's framework of poetic language? Kristeva explores dialogism within the framework of intertextuality—"the passage from one sign system to another," the way in which one signifying practice is transposed into another. Even a single word, according to
Kristeva, does not have a single fixed meaning; but rather it is seen as an intersection point among texts created by dialogues between different types of writings. Words, in this sense, fully reveal dialogism. The most important elements and characteristics of poetic language, therefore, consist of heterogeneity, diversity, and dialogism. Poetic
language is a kind of autonomous, free and liberated form of parole, which provides more speaking freedom for the writer and larger space for generation of meanings.
For both Kingston and Kristeva, the adoption of poetic language in their specific
contexts seems to be a natural and necessary choice.
Heterogeneity: Kingston as a Bilingual Writer
Heterogeneity is the essence of poetic language and also an inherited vantage
point for ethnic minority, diasporic and female writers. For majority citizens of their
national territories, they are the minors and outsiders; and in a male dominant society,
they are the marginal and the other. Living in the between and betwixt position of
two languages and two cultures, they have a feeling of unhomelessness that is
prevalent in relation to either of these literatures and cultures. The innate, multiple
layered heterogeneous space, nevertheless, provides them more possibilities for
poetic expressions than those native, male writers. In this sense, it is valid to say that
Kingston's poetic language is engendered from her identity as a bilingual writer and
from the heterogeneous space of the between and betwixt.
To interpret Kingston's writing from such a perspective, one could understand
how her ethnicity, female body and especially her bilingual background have affected
44 Chapter One: Return to the Parole her way of speech and her way of using poetic language in writing. I argue that
Kingston's writing strategy, when compared with her predecessors and contemporaries, strays away from the path of seeking an ethnographical and
positivist language representation and accentuates a poetic referentiality dimension in
writing. As noted by Linda Sledge, Kingston's language stands out with her unique
ability "to invest idiomatic English with the allusive texture and oral-aural qualities
of Chinese."® Such "convulsiveness" leads me to classify her writing as that of the
poetic language and her text primarily as site of revolt, where the "thing"-a sort of
alternative female/minor desire-is always fighting its way to the surface of the
signification of the text, while the symbolic, at the levels of syntax and of narrative,
works always to keep it in check. As Kristeva explains, "poetic discourse measures
rhythms against the meaning of language structure and is thus always eluded by
meaning in the present while continually postponing it to an impossible
time-to-come."® The experience of reading Kingston's texts is thus taut and
tension-filled. It becomes clear that, for many, reading these texts is an experience
rife with negativity, lack-death.
When being asked years ago by Maggie Ann Bower in an interview about the
way she would like her works to be received, Kingston expressed her idea of aiming
� Linda C. Sledge, "Oral Tradition in Kingston's China Men," Redefining American
Literary History (New York: The Modern Language Association of America,
1990), p. 145.
� Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980),
p. 33.
45 Chapter One: Return to the Parole to write in a style of an ancient Chinese poet, in a way as her literary predecessors who would "not only composed [their] poetry but...painted it; did [their] calligraphy and sang and performed it"; so as to become an artist that is "a more integrated and whole person,"® Specifically, one of the prominent language features of Kingston's debut work The Woman Warrior is her interplay of two systems of linguistic/ translingual elements-English and Chinese. Identifying a maternal connection with
Chinese language as well as with Chinese culture, Kingston continuously referred to herself as playing the role of a "translator" in The Woman Warrior:
My hands are writing English, but my mouth is speaking Chinese.
Somehow I am able to write a language that captures the Chinese rhythms
and tones and images, getting that power into English. I am working in
some kind of fusion language.�
As a crucial intertextual strategy, translation is transparent in Kingston's narrative. The Chinese source materials, when translated into English, have lost most of their markers as linguistic foreign texts in Kingston's standardized English. Her translational practice has been analyzed by critics like Huang to serve the function of
"the textual translation that eliminates the foreign, nonstandard elements of language
� Maggie Ann Bower. "Kingston's Interview with Maggie Ann Bower." Writing
Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk (London and New York: Routledge,
2004), p. 173.
� Miel Alegre, and Dave Weich, "Maxine Hong Kingston After the Fire",
http://www.powells.com/authors/kingston.html.
46 Chapter One: Return to the Parole experience to reified cultural translation of a universal 'American' experience."'''
Applying Edward Said's Orientalism and Lawrence Venuti's translation theory to his analysis, Huang argues that "Kingston's re-representation of Chinese intertexts, read as either a cultural or textual translation, tends to smooth away the linguistic ruptures left by intertextual/intercultural transposition."®
Huang's analysis suggests the domesticating nature of Kingston's translation by pointing out that "Kingston's articulation of Chinese intertexts in standard English may become representations of 'strange' experiences to a reader who is not aware of the ongoing translation•”� In the first chapter of The Translator 's Invisibility,
Lawrence Venuti defines a domesticating translation strategy as one in which the translated text "reads fluently ... the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text-the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the 'original.'"®
Such transparency establishes easy readability for the English language reader (the target-language reader) "by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax,
� Yunte Huang, Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and
Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 2002), p. 52.
® Ibid, p. 151.
� Ibid., p. 151.
� Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility (London and New York: Routledge,
2008), p. 1.
47 Chapter One: Return to the Parole fixing a precise meaning."® Borrowing this concept from Venuti, the appeal and assimilation Kingston demonstrated in her writing to the English reading Western audience is read as inscribing cultural difference as similarity, "to bring back a cultural other as the same, the recognizable, even the familiar" and thereby engaging in the "appropriation of foreign culture for domestic agendas, cultural, economic, political."®
Although it would be simple to settle on a literary analysis like Huang's on The
Woman Warrior, which attaches Kingston's language representation choices to a domesticating translation strategy, a closer inspection of her text reveals a more complex series of dynamics at work. What is at issue is whether Kingston completely conforms language representations to domestic/canonical literary and cultural values or whether there exist deliberate attempts of resistance in her language practice, making her representations more ambivalent than it seems at first glance. Specifically,
I would like to argue that not only Kingston's narration is full of postmodern fissures and ruptures as many of the critics have pointed out, but her seemingly smooth translation are also full of holes and gaps which are permeated with subversive power.
Rather than smoothing away the linguistic gaps, these ruptures/fissures make the intertextual/intercultural transposition produce an effect of defamiliarization. I would like to link the notion of resistance to a foreignizing translation strategy which, in
Venuti，s words, "challenges the target-language culture even as it enacts its own
� Ibid.，p. 1.
� Ibid., pp. 18-19.
48 Chapter One: Return to the Parole ethnocentric violence on the text."® Though the text is still inscribed with domestic cultural values, a resistant or foreignizing translation strategy refuses to present the text as transparent by exchanging a fluent discourse for a heterogeneous one.
According to Venuti, textual production may be initiated and guided by the producer, but it puts to work various linguistic and cultural materials which make the text discontinuous, despite any appearance of unity, and which create an unconscious, a set of unacknowledged conditions that are both personal and social, psychological and ideological. Thus，the translator consults many different target-language cultural materials, ranging from dictionaries and grammars to texts, discursive strategies, and translations, to values, paradigms, and ideologies, both canonical and marginal.
Although intended to reproduce the source-language text, the translator's consultation of these materials inevitably reduces and supplements it, even when source-language cultural materials are also consulted. Their sheer heterogeneity leads to discontinuities—between the source-language text and the translation and within the translation itself-that are symptomatic of its ethnocentric violence. As Venuti puts in The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation, "A symptomatic reading... locates discontinuities at the level of diction, syntax, or discourse that reveal the translating to be a violent rewriting of the foreign text, a strategic intervention into the target-language culture, at once dependent on and abusive of domestic cultural values.，，�
� Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility (London and New York: Routledge,
2008), p. 24.
� Lawrence Venuti, The Translator's Invisibility (London and New York: Routledge,
2008), p. 25.
49 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
When being addressed from this standpoint, it demonstrates that traces of irreconcilability are innate in any translational practice of intertextual/intercultural transposition. Despite the more readable language, the translation of the transliterated
Chinese, (the explanations of Chinese culture and customs), and the common theme of the immigrant's pursuit of the American Dream—all suggests domestication in language representations, there is still evitable resistance in Kingston's "standard"
English through ruptures/discontinuity that calls attention to difference and the cultural other.
As a bilingual Asian American writer, Kingston says that I was "born with two tongues to speak myself, to speak of truth, erase my fears, name my children, shout down idols, never forget, to praise, to be, to say, to free" ("Biography" online).
However, as an American native English speaker whose English ability is still evaluated along with her physical, "foreign Asian traits", the tension between perceived foreignness and her actual Americanness is innate in her body. This situation can be conceptualized as an Asian American variation of DuBois's concept of double consciousness: "the unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals within one dark (yellow) body."®
In The Woman Warrior, the description of the narrator's childhood experience of learning English in school is a vivid illustration of the two warring ideals inside an
� A bifurcated consciousness may not be the best nor adequate for theorizing the
bilingual/multilingual letters' experience. For the purpose of constructing the
arguments necessary for the articulation of this thesis, however, we will work
with the double-consciousness model for the present.
50 Chapter One: Return to the Parole ethnic body:
The Chinese "I" has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American
“I，，，assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, have only three strokes, the
middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this writer left off strokes
the way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked?... The
other troublesome word was "here," no strong consonant to hang on to, and
so flat, where "here" is two mountainous ideographs. (166-7)
Diversity ： A New Fusion Language
Heterogeneity is the basis and premise of diversity, but diversity is also the effect and goal of heterogeneity. In this sense, Kingston can be seen as pursuing a mode of heterogeneous bilingual writing, which is full of polyvalent seeds and values. These polyvalues and polygrams suggest a return to parole for a new fusion language to achieve diversity. This is another characteristic of her poetic language.
Thus we see in Kingston's writing of The Woman Warrior an interplay of two systems of linguistic/translingua丨 elements-English and Chinese, which resembles a translation act. In many of her interviews on The Woman Warrior,
Kingston constantly refers to herself as playing the role of a "translator" who translate a kind of double consciousness into language. Identifying Chinese as her mother tongue, she intends to integrate Chinese elements into her novels as a way to "perfect" her English. The result, as she expresses in the instance of her rereading of her own work, is that "she sees the Chinese in her book and could clearly feel the rhythms and power of the language."
Through the act of translation, not only are new semantic meanings conveyed in
51 Chapter One: Return to the Parole the signifying process, new sounds and images are also cretaed. Kingston attempts to build a whole new syntax and tempo into Anglo-saxon authorized English that successfully helps her recontextualize her maternal lineage-- Chinese myths, legends and stories in her English-speaking monological world. Together with foreign images and analogies, Kingston introduces an unfamiliar poetics and aesthetics into her writings through the translational act. Through the practice of translation, Kingston expresses a special quality of poetic language - its very lack of fixity, its multiple referential ity, present even as it aims to capture and even invoke the experienced complexity that is its subject. In particular, the visual etymological origin of the
Chinese language adds a pictorial aspect to Kingston's writing.
The new fusion language in Kingston's writing is richly polyvalent and open to many possible interpretations and connections with both real and allegorical/metaphorical referents. It is a language that expands dialogues rather than draws closures; and moreover, it refuses to stay within the borders of a single textual\cultural context, and constantly crosses the lines we thought were clearly in place. This form of language, as Caryl Emerson suggests, can be described as "living discourse" which, "unlike a dictionary, is always in flux and in rebellion against its own rules."® In this regard, Bakhtin's idea of the liveliness of dialogic literary language can help us understand the question of semantic multivalence. As Emerson notes, "In place of the comfortable patterns of synethesis and Aufgebung, Bakhtin posits a dualistic universe of permanent dialogue. Life in language is in fact dependent on the preservation of a gap [...] This true communication never makes
� Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Editor's Preface, Problems of Dostoevsky 's Poetics
((New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. xxxi.
52 Chapter One: Return to the Parole languages sound the same, never erases boundaries, never pretends to a perfect fit.’必
In Kingston's writing, intentionally inserted gaps are seen throughout her language. Most of which are created through the act of intertextual/intercultural translations. As autobiographical writings by a young American-born author who had never set foot on China until the book was published, Kingston's narratives are heavily colored by Chinese cultural and historical elements. Throughout her writing, there are prevalent examples of paragraphs where "perfect" English contrasts sharply with the book's predominate Chinese settings;� and direct references of Chinese ideography and Chinese phrases of transliteration are accompanied by large amount of Chinese histories, legends and myths.
One of the means for Kingston to achieve the gap is to "fill" her writing with translations of Chinese characters, where she thematizes the ideographs, but rarely gives out the actual words. One of the examples to illustrate this point can be found in the second episode "White Tigers" of The Woman Warrior, where Kingston writes about the no-name girl's trip of seeking revenge.
The call would come from a bird that flew over our roof. In the brush
drawings it looks like the ideograph for "human", two black wings. The bird
would cross the sun and lift into the mountains (which look like the
ideograph "mountain"), there parting the mist briefly that swirled opaque
again. I would be a little girl of seven the day I followed the bird away into
� Ibid.，pp. xxxii-xxxiii.
� Three out of the total five chapters' background are situated in China in The
Woman Warrior and not to mention China Men.
‘53 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
the mountains. (26)
In this passage, readers with knowledge of Chinese culture and ideography can appreciate a distinctive imaginative description by following the rich visual imagery hints. Based on the visual etymological origin of the Chinese language, Kingston's
English writing carries on the imagery effect of Chinese. Distant mountains, soaring birds and a lonely traveler—these elements that juxtapose all together in a "murky,"
"ink-wash" world conjure up a familiar landscape of Chinese tradition. This technique of associating abstract signs of Chinese calligraphy with real bird and mountain resembles the unique brushing technique in Chinese mountains-and-waters painting.
As Linda Sledge notes, the passage is a daring reinterpretation of the traditional
"banquet" formula of Chinese vernacular fiction. Instead of describing objects in circular fashion, Kingston turns the formula on its head and describes objects as they align themselves in vertical space. Thus the focus shifts from the earthly-horizontal plane to a vertical-cosmic one in keeping with the metaphysical musings of the young heroine.� The young girl sketches the sights she sees along the way from village to mountain, using images of Chinese ideographs as a Chinese painter uses black ink and white space, to "summon into being a natural world charged with
� Linda C. Sledge, "Oral Tradition in Kingston's China Men," Redefining American
Literary History (New York: The Modern Language Association of America,
1990), p. 150-153.
54 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
sublimity."® The girl as a lonely traveler is small, yet reverent in the face of nature's
immensity, like the tiny human figures in a Chinese landscape gazing up at an
unpainted expanse of sky. This benevolent cosmos is shaped by Kingston's vivid
depiction of scenery passing before the youth's eyes. The lush language may obscure
the formulaic method Kingston employs: descriptions of objects are based not only
on geographic positions but on an increasingly complex level of abstraction. The
reader and the girl move from the literal realm-that is, from the printed letters that jump in front of the eyes and the ging kong words that slip into the ears~to a glimpse
of the ineffable, and ascending ridge of mountain peaks disappearing into the
heavens.^
Another device Kingston uses for the sake of creating gaps in her language is the
application of transliterated words in her writing. Without specifying the corresponding
Chinese ideographs for the transliterated words she uses, Kingston cleverly uses the
homographs in Chinese language to remind us of the lack of fixity and
multiple-referentiality in poetic language. Chinese is a language ready-made for such
literal use. Because it is a tonal language, voice pitch determines the meaning of the
word. It is easy for a single word to have several meanings depending on how the
speaker pitches the voice. Thus, transliterated language in Kingston's writing is not
naively representational with simple one-to-one correspondence between word and
referent. Rather, it is as richly multivalent. In some places, Kingston seems to
delight in language play. Note how complex the nominal "toad" is, for instance, in
one of Kingston's earliest language lessons. I quote here Mary Slowik's citation of
the passage because it illustrates as one of the most complete lessons in pre-literate
� Ibid.，p. 153.
55 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
Chinese that Kingston offers us:
The black dirt in their yard set off my dazzling shoes—two chunks of
white light that encased my feet. "Look, Look," said Say Goong, Fourth
Grandfather, my railroad grandfather's youngest brother. "A field chicken."
It was not a chicken at all but a toad with alert round eyes that looked out
from under the white cabbage leaves. It hopped ahead of my shoes, dived
into the leaves, and disappeared, reappeared, maybe another toad. It was a
clod that had detached itself from the living earth; the earth had formed into
a toad and hopped. "A field chicken," said Say Goong. He cupped his hands,
walked quietly with wide steps and caught it. On his brown hand sat a toad
with perfect haunches, eyelids, veins, and wrinkles--the details of it, the
neatness and completeness of it swallowing and blinking. "A field chicken?"
I repeated. "Field chicken," he said. "Sky chicken. Sky toad. Heavenly toad.
Field toad." It was a pun and the words the same except for the low tone of
field and die high tone of heaven or sty. He put the toad in my hands-it
breathed, and its heart beat, every part of it alive--and I felt its dryness and
warmth and hind feet as it sprang off. How odd that a toad could be both of
the field and of the sky. It was very funny. Say Goong and I laughed.
"Heavenly chicken," I called, chasing the toad. I carefully ran between the
rows of vegetables, where many toads, giants and miniatures, hopped every-
where. Which one was the toad in my hand? Then suddenly they were all
gone. But they clucked. So it isn't that toads look or taste like chickens that
they're called chickens; they cluck alike! (165-66).®
� This is a passage analyzed by Mary Slowik at length in "When the Ghost Speaks:
56 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
As a pitched language with nine tones for a same syllable'^, Chinese holds disparate meanings together in ways different from English. Its system of reference allows things to become other things, and the part to represent the whole. This feature is often further enhanced in literature by the use of poetic language. Poetic language seems to have the ability enter into "a centerless whirl of activity when one speaks of endless substitutions, words standing for other words.”老 Through the very act of translation or by integrating transliterated non-pitched Chinese into English, the language would become a fusion; and in this fused language a single word may have dual or even multiple separate and distinct signification processes. For instance, in the case of "field chicken," the non-pitched transliterated word moves freely from
"chicken" to "sky" in its bilingual contexts. Yet neither is the toad a chicken, nor is it the sky. Without a necessary "is" to connect these things, they are joined but not collapsed together. English rhetoric devices such as simile or analogy or allegory are perhaps the closest "analogy" comes to this habit of mind. In allegories, for instance, parallel yet distinctive worlds exist side by side in this "fused" language. Through the power of imagination and logic, they are brought into an alignment which reveals
Oral and Written Narrative Forms in Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men；'
MEWS, 19, 1, Spring, 1994, p. 74.
� It is nine tones for Cantonese, the type of Chinese Kingston is speaking. But
usually for mandarin there is only four tones.
� Slowik, Mary. "When the Ghost Speaks: Oral and Written Narrative Forms in
Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men：' MEL US, 19, 1, Spring, 1994，p. 76.
57 Chapter One: Return to the Parole interesting things about each, yet still remains basically separate and distinct.�
However, as the different meanings provided by these English figural of speeches are still more or less connected by an innate sense of logic, the Chinese words are more
"disturbing" with their more arbitrary connections.
Dialogism: From Words to Culture
In Kingston's works, dialogism indicates another distinguished characteristic of poetic language; and in this sense, Kingston's writing practice could be interpreted as a dialogical act, which employs multi-layered dialogues in terms of words, narratives, images and even cultures.
(1) Word Dialogism
Dialogism in words is determined by the position of the words, which refers to an intersectional point of language and space. One should not only study how one word correlates with other words in sentences, but also find out the word's corresponding relationshipthat is, how it functions within a broad context. A word, so to speak, should be examined against its historical and social backgrounds. In such a way, a word can be described in a 3-demensional dialogical coordination system.
One dimension is the writing subject, the other is the reader, and the third is the outer text. The position of a word is thus determined by the abscissa (X-coordinate) and the ordinate (Y-coordinate): Judging from the abscissa, the word in the text belongs to both reader and the author; judging from the Y-coordinate, the word in the text refers to antecede or coeval linguistic materials. Therefore, every word or text is
� Ibid., pp. 78-79.
58 Chapter One: Return to the Parole situated at the intersectional point with at least one other word or text.
Simply put, dialogism inside a word is demonstrated through the dialogue between abscissa author and reader or author and characters, its ambivalence is evident owing to its different discourse backgrounds-antecede or coeval. Thus, every text constitutes at least two different texts. This effect is characterized by the double-discourse in poetic language. Take the usage of "ghost" in The Woman
Warrior for example. What image does the word conjure up in readers' minds?
Kingston argues that ghosts "are not simply white people but 'shadowy figures from the past' or unanswered questions about unexplained actions of Chinese, whites, and
Chinese in America." Thus, the words "ghost" here carries multi-cultural connotations, provokes various mental images, and implies different ideological conceptions. Generally speaking, the word can be put into three categories: Chinese ghosts, American ghosts and Chinese American ghosts. There are, furthermore, numerous different types of ghosts in Chinese ghost stories. The "Sitting Ghost," which the narrator's mother met when she was in midwifery school, had "no true head, no eyes, no face" (85). There are also for Brave Orchid the American ghosts—"America has been full of machines and ghosts" (113). According to their professions, they are classified into as many as over twenty kinds. They are also grouped, according to ethnicity, in to White Ghosts, Black Ghosts, Gypsy Ghosts and
Mexican Ghosts. To Brave Orchid, these ghosts imply "a new category of unfathomable beings whose actions are puzzling to the immigrant community, and whose speech borders on the unintelligible." Moreover, the Chinese-American daughter is an out-and-out "ghost" from her mother's point of view. All her children
"had been born among ghosts, were taught by ghosts" (213) and therefore were ghostlike. Like those who talk about everything loudly, "ghosts are noisy and full of
59 Chapter One: Return to the Parole air; they talk during meals" (214). Brave Orchid and other immigrants label the girl as "Ho Chi Kuei," a Cantonese word for "Curiosity Ghosts," since she is all the time acquisitive about family sagas, Chinese customs and culture taboos.
From this example, we cam see that "word," serving as the smallest text unit, functions as a kind of link, which connects specific types of ideologies with practice, and joins structural models with cultural and historical meanings. In this sense,
'word' has been spatialized. In terms of synchronic development, word represents an aggregation of dialogical elements in a three dimensional space. Its result is that the mission of literary semiotics is to find other systems in the dialogic space of the text.
That is to say, any description that is conducted on how a word specifically functions within various literary text and genre calls for a trans-lingual procedure-the act to exceed connection from language to social and historical contexts. Foremost of all, literary genre is no longer a perfect sign system; secondly, one must discover various relationships within larger narrative units, but these relationships do not have to be built on the foundation of those linguistic models that are legalized by semantic expansion principles. It includes flexible and changeable relationships in different social and historical contexts.
(2) Narrative Dialogism
According to Bakhtin, there exists a dialogical relationship between the subject of narration as signification means and addressee as signification content. The emphasis on the speaking subject itself suggests that narrative text is dialogical.
Narration can be considered as a dialogue between the subject of narration (addresser) and the other (addressee). This addressee as the reading subject represents a dual way oriented entity: Signifier (means of signification) in its relation to the text and
60 Chapter One: Return to the Parole signified (signification object) in its relation to the subject of narration. These two parts that communicate with each other create a regulating system. If we interpret it in terms of writing and take the writer as the subject of narration, his/her interlocutor or addresses is the reader-self of the writer. He seems to be reading another piece of writing. So the construct of one text seems to be interposed by another text. Between writer-addressor and reader-addressee, the author is structured as a signifier and the text as a dialogue of two discourses.
We can further elaborate on this idea by drawing a parallel to what Linda
Hutcheon has described as the narrative characteristics of historiographic metafiction, which is "both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages.”� She remarks that histroigraphic metafiction
"appears to privilege two modes of narration, both of which problematize the entire notion of subjectivity: multiple points of views, or an overtly controlling narrator.”:岁
Specifically in Kingston's The Woman Warrior, dialogism is presented in forms of multiple layers of narration. One vivid example can be found in the chapter about no-name woman. In the process of tracing back the story of her no-name aunt, who was insulted by the villagers due to adultery and later committed suicide with the new born baby, the narrator juxtaposes many possibilities in the narration:
Perhaps she had encountered him in the fields of on the mountain where
the daughters-in-law collected fuel. Or perhaps he first noticed her in the
� Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London
and New York: Routledge, 1988)，p. 5.
� Ibid., p. 117.
61 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
market place...His demand must have surprised, then terrified her. She
obeyed him; she always did as she was told. (14)
It could very well have been, however, that my aunt did not take subtle
enjoyment of her friend, but wild woman, kept rollicking company.
Imagining her free with sex... (16)
These different facets of story presented in the narration vividly demonstrate the process of writing-- how the subject of enunciation dialogues with the reading subject. The subject of narration not only encourages the reader to postulate about the truth of the story, but also mimics the variety of doubts, hardship and struggles that the female protagonist may face in the process maturing. The narration itself resembles the formidable process of identity-search in an ambivalent, confusing, pretentious environment the no name woman had gone through. Thus the narrative of no-name woman itself is a multi-layered, multi-meaning, paradoxical and tension-brimming text~a polyphonic text full of dialogical discourses. As Kristeva observes, in the process of narrative dialogism, writing, which “reads another writing, reads itself and constructs itself through a process of destructive genesis.，，�
Narrative dialogism is also evident in Chapter Three of The Woman Warrior, in which Kingston uses her mother's self-recollection as materials to create her mother's biography. This chapter can be divided into seven parts. The odd number parts, namely one, three and five, depict the mother as a diligent medical student, a successful countryside doctor, and a hero who dares to exorcised ghosts from the
� Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader (New York, NY: Columbia University Press,
1986), p. 45.
62 Chapter One: Return to the Parole deserted dormitory respectively. All these connect respectively with different merits of the mother, such as courage, talents and ambition. On the other hand, the even number parts, namely two, four and six, are narratives about the mother's selecting slaves in the market, being down and out as she first arrived in America, and rejecting the barbarous American culture. In these two different sections divided by odd and even numbers, the narrator's ambivalent feeling for the mother as admiration and fear surface alternatively, creating a dialogical rhythm that could be detected through its narrative form. Such a unique dialogic narrative form helps demonstrate the narrator's complex attitude she held toward her mother and Chinese traditional culture that the mother figure represents.
(3) Character Dialogism
For character dialogism, the emphasis is put on specific interactions between all kinds of independent but equally signifying consciousnesses possessed by the characters. Interactions penetrate into almost every word of the novel making them double-imaged (voiced). One image (voice) expressed is accompanied by another image (voice) complementing, contradicting and disagreeing with others. The two images (voices) are dialoging with each other. An example to illustrate this point can be found in the chapter about White Tiger, where the narrator's split self of “Chinese daughter" and "American daughter" fall into a dialogue. The narrator follows a bird away into the mountains where an old man and an old woman will teach her martial arts:
The door opened, and an old man and an old woman came out carrying
bowls of rice and soup and leafy branch of peaches.
"Have you eaten rice today, little girl?" they greeted me.
63 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
"Yes, I have," I said out politeness, "Thank you."
("No, I haven't." I would have said in real life, mad at the Chinese for
lying so much. "I'm starved. Do you have any cookies? I like chocolate chip
cookies.") (26)
Through juxtaposing the outside image of Chinese daughter, whose conduct and speech manner are well subordinated and regulated by Chinese traditions with an image represented inside the bracket-American self that is more free-minded and outspoken, the inner conflicts such as racial confrontation and cultural clashes inside the narrator's identity are fully revealed: She comes from a traditional Chinese immigrant family, but receives predominately Western tradition; China is her true
"motherland" while America is her real "home." Character dialogism here successfully externalizes the hidden oppositions in the text, leaving them for constant interactions and negotiations.
Beside the dialogism between Chinese and American daughter, there also lies another layer of dialogism in this example. Kingston innovatively combines the
Chinese talk-story tradition of narration in her Western postmodern narratives. Thus, we see in The Woman Warrior a type of intrusive narrator, who willfully intrudes into the text, braking narration while introducing her own understanding to the reader. In the example given above, Kingston uses brackets to present her interposed narration.
Resembling how a storyteller resorts to changes in tune and intonation to present to the audience that this is a non-character speaker speaking, Kingston's use of interposed narration helps create sympathy between reader and writer, tricking the readers to accept the writer's view meanwhile helping them identify with the characters, in turn exerting influence on the reader. Such is the character dialogism
64 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
between author and reader.
Furthermore, if we view the chapter of "White Tiger" as a whole, the legendary
figure of woman warrior herself is an imagined "self split from the narrator.
Adopting an Fa Mu Lan-like life trajectory, the imagined "self travels in a land juxtaposed with Chinese and American social norms so as to break away from her
American life that "has been such a disappointment，，(45). In the story, she is a
champion fighter respected by her villagers. Instead of disguising girls, her parents
"killed a chicken and steamed it whole, as if there were welcoming home a son..."
(34). While shortly on the next page, the 'real' self is ironically being compared as
"feeding girl is feeding cowbird" (35), "there's no profit in raising girls, better to
raise geese than girls" (46).
We also have the mother and daughter dialogues that permeate throughout the
whole book. The mother is a contradictory image. She is a keeper and transmitter of
the Chinese tradition; however, she used to be a brave and respectable shaman. She
speaks for patriarchal norms; meanwhile, she encourages her daughter to be as brave
as Fa Mu Lan. The daughter, born and brought up in America, is always bewildered
by her mother's inculcations. She struggles between the two kinds of cultural norms
and tries to negotiate an identity for herself. Through reworking of her mother's
stories, the daughter claims an equal position to dialogue with her mother, to
articulate her own voice. Between the narrator and her mother, there exist
relationships of agreement/disagreement, affirmation/supplementation, and
question/answer, etc. This is a kind of subtle dialogism in that the reworking of her
mother's stories is practically a process of dialoguing.
65 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
(4) Cultural Dialogism
In Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Michael Holquist points out the endlessness of Bakhtin's dialogues:
There is neither a first word nor a last word. The contexts of dialogue
are without limit. They extend into the deepest past and the most distant
future. Even meanings born in dialogues of the remotest past will never be
finally grasped once and for all, for they will always be renewed in later
dialogue. At any present moment of the dialogue there are great masses of
forgotten meanings, but these will be recalled again at a given moment in
the dialogue's later course when it will be given a new life. For nothing is
absolutely dead: every meaning will someday have its home coming
festival.®
Focusing on this open-endedness of dialogue, Li Yanzhu, a Chinese scholar, remarks: Bakhtinian dialogue is a consistent two-way movement between different consciousnesses, but not just a binary opposition; it is not a process that will be exhausted at some point®. He argues that Bakhtin's dialogic theory actually expands into the area of human cultures. Firstly, cultures free themselves from the limitation of their own cultural legends, then different cultures contradict and dialogue with each other on various levels. At last, the centrifugal force from these diversified
� Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London: New York:
Routledge, 2002), p. 31.
� Yan Zhu Li, Ba He Jin Dui Hua De Xian Dai Yi Yi {Wen Shi Zhe, 2001)，pp.
51-56.
66 Chapter One: Return to the Parole voices lashes over, overturns and deconstructs the voice of the hegemonic culture.
The hegemonic culture then has to come out of the fence and accept a multi-cultural world. In dialogue between cultures, the self-centered monologic culture gives way to a dialogic culture in which all kinds of voices and values coexist and interact with each other®.
This observation on the open-endness of dialogues echoes first with what
Kristeva means when she refers to the context of a text. Kristeva challenges the limited, purely literal definition in the OED that refers to "context" as "the connected structure of a writing or composition and parts which immediately precede or follow any particular passage or 'text' and determine its meaning."'* Kristeva posits here a definition that interprets the word in a more expanded way, since her notion of
"context" should not be understood as an isolated and unitary phenomenon. It cannot be determined once and for all. It should be the "context" in Jacques Derrida's sense in how a text can be taken to have any number of con-texts. To Derrida and Kristeva, inscribing a specific context for a text does not close or fix the meaning of that text once and for all: There is always the possibility of reinscribing it with other contexts, a possibility that is indeed in principle boundless, and that is structural to any piece of language.
This open-ended context dialogism best illustrates itself in the process of identity seeking for the Chinese American group in The Woman Warrior. Historically
® Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin,
TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), p, 367.
® Item 2,4, OED online.
67 Chapter One: Return to the Parole speaking, Chinese Americans are a group of diaspora inescapable from the historical phenomenon called colonialism. Like all other diaspora groups, in order to maintain their traditions, morals and customs, Chinese American diasporas employ many strategies. The main one is the communal strategy, which means that the diasporas remain relatively small minorities in host countries. By deciding to settle down permanently but rejecting whole integration and assimilation into American society, they are confronted with a mighty host society holding white people as the center.
Thus, the two discourses' relationship is characteristically "asymmetrical," because the two discourses evolved at the historical juncture when America emerged as a power in an imperialist global system while China's self-authorized central ity is no longer held. Under such conditions, Chinese Americans' identity becomes uncertain.
They begin to ask questions about their identity, and endeavor to seek their identity by dialoguing with their root culture and host culture. Great efforts are made to break through the monologicized American culture so as to develop a dialogic atmosphere that encourages ambivalence and plurality�.
Such a conflict between the two cultures most intensively speaks for itself in the younger generations of Chinese descendents. The conflict between the mother and the daughter discussed in the previous part is actually a specific narration about the conflict and dialogue between Chinese cultural tradition and the mainstream
American culture. The difficult relationship between the mother and the daughter is an example to show the dilemma that most Chinese immigrant families are facing.
They are caught between two cultural worlds. Thus, dialoging is resorted as an
� Cui Hua Mo, "Zou Xiang Dui Hua. ” Ph.D. diss” Wuhan University, 2005, p. 43.
68 Chapter One: Return to the Parole effective way for the Chinese Americans to identify themselves among the chaos.
The daughter once states in the novel, "If you don't talk, you can't not have a personality" (193).
In addition to the dialogue between Chinese tradition and mainstream American white culture, The Woman Warrior also represents a subtle context dialogism that lies between mainstream and minority literature. As a work of Chinese American literature, The Woman Warrior has an outer context dialogism of minority and mainstream literature. Despite its evident fictitious elements, discontinuous chronology, and more importantly, the writer's strong insistence on taking her work as a fiction, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. the publisher, still chose to market Kingston's book as nonfiction, a memoir to be exact, for almost all other minority writers before
Kingston's time wrote only autobiographies rather than fictions. Thus the stereotypical denotations carried by the crude divide of minority and mainstream literature not only affect the writer's self positioning in her dialogue with the reader, but also alter her writing intentions, and influence readers' expectation and in turn their interpretations of the story.
Moreover, if we borrow from Deleuze and Guattari their concept of "minor literature" to categorize The Woman Warrior, it is a literature not "written in a
'minor' language, or in a formerly colonized langue but rather in a major language，，� but by a marginal writer who is "stranger" to the language used, cultural dialogism can again be found between "major language" and "minor language"—in the case of
� G. Deleuze, and F. Guattari, Kafka. Towards a Minor Literature (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1986), p. 6.
69 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
Kingston, between English and Chinese. To a certain extent, both "standard" English and mainstream culture have been deterritorialized '' in The Woman Warrior. For instance, dialogism between major language/culture and minor language/culture is constituted in terms of ethnic experiences, or to be more specific, Chinese Americans experiences. In the process of writing The Woman Warrior�Kingston connects herself with one of her own characters, Ts'ai Yen, an ancient Chinese poetess who authored the famous "Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe." Like Ts'ai Yen, Kingston is an exile who lives in "savage lands" among "barbarians" (209). With her focus on
Ts'ai Yen's poetic feat, her writing is her attempt to emulate the ancient poetess to create a song whose words "seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger" (209).
‘The writing of literary works is essentially an act of creation that appeals to letter and words-language if one considers from a most literal sense. Although literature may or even in a sense inevitably connects with extralinguistic terrains outside the text such as ethnicity, culture, identity, gender, class and etc., language is still foremost of all its major concern as its expressive and representation medium. Therefore, for a writer, especially an Asian American female writer with multi-cultural and bilingual background, issues relating to her language attitudes, concepts and practices are what are inescapable and awaits confrontation. Moreover, these problems and questions are of quintessential value and meaning to anyone as a writer, regardless of one's background:
� Deterritorialization, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is "the first characteristic
of a minor literature... (since) is that in it language is affected with a high
coefficient of deterritorialization." Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London
and New York: Routledge, 2002)，p. 105.
70 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
mainstream or minor; male or female. This self-consciousness towards language is indeed what ultimately draws the line to distinguish a writer from other artists like a painter or a musician. Specific issues of language can also be divided into two parts, following Saussure's assertion: One concerning the langue, and the other concerning the parole. As langue consists of the rule governed structures of a language—its grammatical, phonological, lexical, and syntactical structures, the parole, referring to the actual speech acts produced by speakers or writers of a language using the langue, is more of the center focus of our discussion here in this chapter.
2 The term "language dilemma" here refers to the presumed/actual conflicts faced by Asian
American writers writing in a dominant tongue—English. As their physical, Asian traits coded as foreign are generally associated with inability to speak and write intelligible and "qualified" English, their language dilemma may in a narrow sense refers to the tension between their perceived foreignness and their actual Americanness. In a broader sense, their language dilemma can also be associated with the pressure from the mainstream English literary world: for instance, commonly adopted rules, standards and even basic criterion on language values, standards and attitudes toward ethnic minority writers; the cultural and ideological restrains they adopt through dis/re-placement.
^The concept of nation here I referred to borrows from Benedict Anderson's term-- "an imagined political community [that is] imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign "(p6- 7 Imagined
Communities).Therefore, its relationship to language is very similar to that of community as they can all be defined in relation to a shared language communication system. Although a close and detailed analysis of their difference is far beyond the scope and capacity of this thesis, I would like to make a quick note to one of their possible gap~the written and the oral. In his book Imagined Communities,
Anderson argued that the creation of imagined communities became possible because of
"print-capitalism"—the existence of "national print-languages." He emphasized on its importance as it enables readers speaking various local dialects to understand each other, so a common discourse emerged. As an actual community, is different from a nation as it is more based on quotidian face-to-face interaction between its members，the emphasis of a shared signifying system is thus more on the oral and the speech than on the written ones.
4 Dennis Kim points out in Beginning at the End: "Portrayals of Chinese are more numerous than for any other Asian group in Anglo-American literature. Although images of Japanese do have some unique dimensions... many of the depictions of Chinese have been generalized to Asians, particularly since Westerns traditionally found it difficult to distinguish among the East Asian nationalities."
71 Chapter One: Return to the Parole
5 This whole description on the little girl traveling on a vast landscape is an imitation of one of
Linda C. Sledge's passage on another work of Kingston一China Men. Like what Kingston herself has admitted in many interviews, China Men and The Woman Warrior are first written as a single book. It is clear that the two works share paralleling qualities in many aspects. Although Sledge first used her analysis for characters in China Men, I argue that a very similar style or trait can as well be found in
The Woman Warrior. See "Oral Tradition in Kingston's China Men," Redefining American Literary
History (New York: The Modem Language Association of America, 1990)，p. 153-153 for details.
72 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Chapter Two Return to the Body
I am body entirely, and nothing beside; and soul is only a word for
something in the body.�
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Ever since Nietzche's famous declaration that "God is dead,”� "Iam body entirely," Western metaphysics and logocentrism tradition have been seriously challenged by irrationalism/ Foucault's declaration that "man is dead" can be read as another impingement on the Enlightenment idea of subject. When the issue still seemed unsolvable as "being" has been degraded to "Dasein" and subject entered the
"twilight of subjectivity" and subsequently declared "dead," the metaphysical being and even the transcendental subject were no longer of the sole legitimacy and reliability. According to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "the perceiving mind is an incarnate mind"; and therefore, the "body" itself was used to replace the fictitious, narrow and missing subject and thus become for many people the solely reliable thing. As
� Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. (Oxford, UK: Oxford World's
Classics, 2005), 1.4.
� The statement "God is dead," occurs in several of Nietzsche's works, primarily,
and perhaps most notably, in The Gay Science. In a parable, Nietzsche lets the
"madman" say: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him!"
73 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Merleau-Ponty's famous quotation goes: "the issue of the world starts from the issue of the body."'
The tendency of "body redirection" in the modern West could perhaps be briefly summarized into two basic types of body concepts. The first one is represented by
Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. They stress more on the "natural body"~body as a living entity with flesh and blood, a habitat of will to life and will to power (Nietzsche), a form of perception and conscious activity (Merleau-Ponty), and a site of all kinds of desires and forces (Deleuze). Therefore, this type of body is active, energetic, primal and productive. In a broad sense, the body keeps on creating parole while subverting langue, since it transgresses history and challenges authority and power. Another type of body concept is presented by Foucault, which emphasizes "cultured body" or disciplined body. Although its existence is also
material and corporal, it is disciplined by culture or by what Foucault calls power or
power discourse. Therefore, this type of body is more passive. It demonstrates a transgression on the body by culture, history, and especially by power. This situation
thus leads to two opposite comprehensions of the body, which rule the majority of
nowadays discussions on the body and also help to form rather complicated and even
oppositional body concepts and ideas.
In this context, the word body used in my discussion mainly refers to the
"natural body," but in some places, it also indicates the idea of “cultural body." In
either of the senses, the body is regarded as a site of resistance against the restriction
set by mainstream society, orthodox power and langue, which symbolizes order and
hierarchy. To return to the body, therefore, would accentuate interpretations based on
the body—the analysis of body narration. In particular, I would like to discuss the
body existence and its conflicts with the surrounding worldespecially with the
74 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor power system from both a natural and cultural aspects of the body.
Moreover, to return to the body, as I will show in this chapter, means to inspect the cultural body as well as the natural body in relation to the common characteristics of Kristeva's poetics and Kingston's resistance to langue. In my view, if all mainstream, orthodox, male homogenous existences—such as predominant social forces, cultural values and ideological paradigms are isomorphic with structural, logocentric, rational sense of langue, then all marginal, rebellious, feminine heterogeneous elements一which include everything that are suppressed and silenced, such as individual experiences and the sub-conscious that are innately connected with the senses of the body. It is in this light that we can see how returning to the body is the most natural "disenchantment" and "deshielding" strategy that Kristeva and Kingston could adopt as female writers. It fundamentally subverts the mainstream, orthodox and male dominant world and its ideology.
Therefore, to return to the body, especially to the female body, could be a natural choice for Kingston's resistance to langue. This choice, in a sense, is a logical extension and significant continuation of the return to the parole. As Kristeva's theory of poetic language suggests, there exist the desire and groundings for returning to the body. It also means a radical w^y of resistance based on female intuitions and self-consciousness. When the body starts to speak, all symbols and all
"systematic languages" pale and languish in front of the body and the "signs" written by the body. To return to the body, therefore, is to go against the langue.
In the following paragraphs, I will first review the basic argument about parole and body in Kristeva's poetics to highlight the inner logic between poetic language and the return to the body. Moreover, I would like to combine the theoretical framework with relevant discussions of Kingston's China Men from the perspectives
75 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor of female writing and body narration.
2.1 From Parole to the Body
The idea of returning to the body is essentially important for Kingston's female writing; and it also provides a link between Kristeva's theory and Kingston's literary practice. In this section, I would like to focus on the relationship between parole and body, and examine body-writing as a new form of resistance to langue. From a bodily perspective, we may have a better understanding of Kingston's language stance and writing strategies. Sigmund Freud once pointed out that body and desire are the sources of artistic production and aesthetic feelings. In his discussion of the concept of body-subject, Merleau-Ponty also observes that body is the source of our perception:
In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves
thinking it, we are given over to the object and we merge into this body
which is better informed than we are about the world.�
In her discussion of poetic language, Kristeva repeatedly refers to the issues of body, langue and parole, emphasizing in particular the question of the maternal body.
The main idea of Kristeva's discussion is that "significance is inherent in the human body"; and body is the source as well as the certifying institution of parole and poetic language. Therefore, body, in comparison with rationality,丨ogocentrism and structure, is more heterogeneous and a more fundamental resistance to langue.
� Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York:
Routledge, 1962)，p. 238.
76 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Langue, Parole, Subject
It is in terms of body that Kristeva's theory helps us understand how Kingston's female writing and narration acquire a kind of consistency and unification, and how the acts of parole, the practices of body-writing and the various forms of resistance to langue are related. Kristeva's theory, therefore, serves as a foundation for our further reading of Kingston's resistance to langue in her writing from the perspective of the body. One of the obvious differences between Kristeva and conventional semiotic studies is her turn from the homogeneous nature of language and structure to the heterogeneous aspect of parole and discourse. To move back to the sources of heterogeneity for parole and discourse leads inevitably to the question of the speaking subject.
From Kristeva's perspective, the basic position of modem linguistics, which has
been heavily influenced by structuralism, not only expels difference, and
heterogeneity like parole, but also ignores the issue of the speaking subject, and even
attempts to erase the "subject" from linguistics. In order to break away from the
Saussurean compliance to langue and disregard to the parole, one must reestablish
the status of the speaking subject. In other words, subject is for Kristeva the
existential premise of all production of meanings. All theories on meaning or theories
of language are bound to take "speaking subject" as their foundation (see The
Revolution of Poetic Language). Kristeva argues that the study of linguistics should
transit from langue as a single, unified structure to language as an un-unified process.
For Kristeva, the traditional semiotics and structuralism are only concerned with
language rules and structures that are synchronic and static. They show no interest in
the existence of the speaking subject. Kristeva's own study, however, focuses on the
77 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor importance of parole and discourse of the speaking subject (see System and the
Speaking Subject) . Thus, in tracing back heterogeneity of parole and discourse, subject and subject related signifying process, Kristeva shifts the focus of semiotics to the practices of "speaking" and to parole-discourse. Indeed, she does not only return to parole and discourse, but also to the subject~the "speaker."
By returning to parole and discourse, the psyche becomes the mediating medium for grasping the subject. As a result, psychoanalysis becomes one of Kristeva's most important analytical tools. Modern psychoanalysis is different from the extreme rationalism of German classicism as proposed by Kant and Hegel, and from strict
European continental structuralism as represented by Saussure. Psychoanalysis is more concerned with living human beings and individuals, with the irrational elements that have been governing the human. Therefore, in Freud and Lacan's psychoanalyses, sex, desire and collective unconscious become the constitutive elements for the subject (id, ego and superego). In other words, the metaphysical/transcendental elements of Cartesian, Kantian, and Husserlian
"subject" have mostly disappeared. The "subject" is to a certain extent replaced by the "individual." At the same time, "subject consciousness" has been replaced by individual (un)consciousness. It is indeed in this sense that Kristeva finds the converging point of linguistics with psychoanalysis: the so-called subject/subjectivity is not only of consciousness but also of unconscious; not only of homogenous nature but also of heterogeneous nature. More importantly, subject/subjectivity is no longer treated as a structure, but rather as a process. Therefore, the transcendental, metaphysical subject becomes more experiential, materialized, individualized and historicalized. This is indeed a significant premise and tenable foundation for psychoanalysis and Kristeva's "semanalysis." Based on this understanding, Kristeva
78 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor emphasizes the application of psychoanalytical methods in exploring their generative and heterogeneous nature. The so-called "semanalysis" could be read as semiotic approaches that combine linguistics and psychoanalysis in the fields of aesthetics and poetics. As Kelly Oliver notes in Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva 's
Writings, it stresses an anti-formalism rereading of linguistics through psychoanalysis and shifts the original focus from structure to the process of its generation, and from signifier to sign.�
Deconstruction of the Subject: The Maternal Body
What is worth noting in Kristeva's representation of psychoanalysis and poetic
language is that she not only approaches the subject by the analysis of parole, but also treats the subject as a substantiated and objective "body," through an
investigation of "mother," "maternity," especially the pregnant body. In this sense, the subject/subjectivity is deconstructed; and what have eventually emerged in front
of us are "the splitting of the subject," a "pre-subject," and an incarnate body.
Following Melanie Klein, Kristeva “emphasizes the maternal function and its
importance in the development of subjectivity and access to culture and language."®
Kristeva's idea on maternity carries double meanings: She defines the maternal
as "the ambivalent principle that is bound to the species, on the one hand, and on the
other stems from an identity catastrophe that causes the Name to topple over into the
� Kelly Oliver, Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva's Writing (London
and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 27.
� Kelly Oliver, Kristeva and Feminism
http://www.cddc.vt.edu/feminism/kristeva.html
79 Chapter Two: Return to the Body unnamable that one imagines as femininity, non language, or body.，， �For Kristeva, therefore, the mother's body is the "pivot of sociality" that is "at once the guarantee and a threat to its stability”�.
Furthermore, mother is a metaphor for the splitting subject. This is especially evident in the cases of the pregnant mother or mother in labor as Kristeva states in
Tales of Love: The arrival of the baby enables the mother to be separated from her own unity thus enabling her to reach another state of ethics. �Pregnancy and birth, in this sense, break the opposition between self and other, subject and object. She also uses the image of "Good-enough mother" to advocate the converging of mother and sexuality as one. Mother is thus bestowed with multiple subjectivities: Mother is both the self and the other, and both the subject and the object's body. Before the mother or maternal body becomes the object of the child, it is neither an object nor a non-object, but rather a thing that is in-between.
In her discussion, Kristeva argues that the body is further divested from the subject, presenting to us two types of existential statuses of the maternity and mother: one is the mother of natural quality, who is connected with the bodily and physiological condition, but also acquires a characteristic of "nature subject,"
� Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader (New York, NY: Columbia University Press,
1986), p. 163.
® Edith Kurzweil, "Interview with Julia Kristeva," Partisan Review, 53, 2, 1986, p.
229.
� Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1987), p.
238.
80 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
"pre-subject," "even some features of not non-subject and non-object"; the other is the mother of societal and cultural meanings. In this sense, the figure of mother simultaneously maintains the heterogeneity of the body and semiotic and cultural features.
"Chora"- A Bodily Metaphor for Resistance to Langue
In her analysis of maternity, mother and the body, Kristeva has talked repeatedly about the issue of'chora" and referred to body's "pre-language." I argue that "chora"
is an appropriate metaphor for bodily resistance to langue?
The word of "chora" is originally borrowed from Plato's Timaeus to denote a
"maternal receptacle," and an "ephemeral space, area or land." It is “a matrix like
space that is nourishing, unnamable, prior to the One and to God, and that thus defies
metaphysics.，,® Kristeva adopts the etymological tradition of the “maternal
receptacle" and connects it with the mother's body, function and metaphor of the
mother. Because of the existence of "chora," mother is not the real subject-at least
not the sole subject, but a part of the symbiotic synthesis with the baby, an
"originally repressed object"--an object that is desired, and a suppressed and
unspeakable part in the infant. The deconstruction of the identity of mother as a
subject not only restores the mother's body that exists as an Object, but also
bestows/restores innate originality and creativity to this body.
In addition, Kristeva also associates the idea ofchora" as a part of the Mother's
body with problems of signs, parole and langue for the sake of redefinition. As Tori
� Julia Kristeva, New Maladies of the Soul (New York, NY: Columbia University
Press, 1992), p. 204.
81 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Moi points out in Sexual/Textual Politics: Chora is not a sign or a signifier; not a module or a copy; it exists in the Presymbolic, undetermined, unnamable and unspeakable. It is the medium where the Semiotic transfers to the Symbolic.
Therefore, chora as an ambiguous, delirious and unspeakable feminine space is not only exempted from the pressure of logos, but also given a pre-linguistic status. It is this delirious status and autonomous "originality" that make up the multiplicity of parole and bodily heterogeneity.
For Kristeva, chora is like a carnival plaza that is full of rhythms and jouissance as well as ambiguity and chaos. Moreover, what Kristeva calls poetic language is like a carnivalesque discourse that is closely connected to maternity. It is not a female language, but a subversive language that is marginal and resist to patriarchal laws. It declares war on God, authority and commonality, denies the oneness of Metaphysics, and breaks traditional semantic logical structures, releasing limitless potential of polyvalentness of language. Poetic language thus has the characteristics of variability, negativity, multiplicity and slippages of the semantics.
In Kristeva's interpretation of "maternal body" and "chora," the subject becomes the object, an incarnate body. Body and chora imply ruptures of logos and provide the foundation for parole and poetic language. At the same time, body can be considered as an anti-order form of resistance to langue. It is in terms of returning to the body and to chora, Kristeva's female philosophy and Kingston's female writing acquire their innate consistency and unification: Body, to both male and female, regardless of the writer's gender preference, becomes the source and drive of originality and betrayal, and thus the writing of body politics.
82 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
2.2 Body-Based Writing
For Kingston and minority female writers, body-based writing indicates basic writing stances, attitude, and strategy that are related to the body, the body politics and philosophy. In other words, body-based writing looks at the ways in which we perceive and represent the world from the body, by the body, and for the body -that is, an individual existence and lived experience.
The question of body-based writing is perhaps one of the distinguishing points between male and female writers. Feminine writing is more relying on sense, sensibility and intuition~they are the most direct features and existence state of the body. In this sense, femininity is innately and more closely connected to the body; and feminine writing is often related to the idea of body writing. In fact, according to feminine writing theories of Cixous and Irigary, women, body and language are three
interrelated and indispensable dimensions.
Kingston's body-based writing, however, is closer to Kristeva's notion of writing.
For Kristeva, desire, abject and phobia are all heterogeneous elements that are closely related to the body. They are also the basic impetus of literary writings. Let me paraphrase what Kristeva has once said: Writing is an art whose aesthetic experience is deeply rooted in the horror/abject. It expresses abjectness, purifying it through expression. Writing is the main path for emotional catharsis. All language writing is the activity of the speech of horror.
Kingston's female, body-based writing carries the following meanings and
characteristics: Female body is the starting point for observation and representing the
world; the drive for writing is for instance the catharsis and dissipation of female
desire, abject and horror. Kingston's writing thus refers to the female body as the
83 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Starting point of speaking in order to get rid of what has been systematized and structuralized, including the interference of the hegemony of male ideologies and pre-formation or homogenization, and in order to ultimately achieve the goal of
"untinted," "direct expression" of the female individual body and heterogeneous life experiences.
Let the Body Speak
In Kristeva's opinion, the symbolic is a constricting, controlling, and inadequate mechanism, for it always works to deny or negate female desire and to alienate women from the community and their bodies. In Revolution in Poetic Language,
Kristeva offers a compelling statement about the structure of language and its potential for self-disruption inside language. Using Lacan's theories of the splitting-subject and the symbolic realm, Kristeva argues for the power of a dynamic speaking subject always in process/on trial. She claims: "The theory of the subject proposed by the theory of the unconscious will allow us to read in this rhythmic space, which has no thesis and no position, the process by which significance is constituted."® In other words, the subject (male or female) speaks from a position of fluidity in communication with the chora, which allows for difference, rupture, movement. For Kristeva, then, the unconscious and the persistence of its drives cannot be completely contained or submerged by the symbolic. One of the most important distinctions between Kristeva and Cixous and Irigaray is that, for
Kristeva, it is not the body that directly provides the means of escape from the symbolic, but rather the unconscious that provides the opportunity for its fissure or "scission."
� Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York, NY: Columbia
University Press, 1984)，p. 26.
84 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Nonetheless, by aligning the semiotic with chora and its maternal realm, Kristeva posits a theory that, like Cixous's and Irigaray's, privileges the feminine as a space that enables dynamic possibility: "Indifferent to language, enigmatic and feminine, this space underlying the written is rhythmic, unfettered, irreducible to its intelligible verbal translation; it is musical, anterior to judgment, but restrained by a single guarantee: syntax."® This possibility, therefore, is in constant struggle within the symbolic; and it is always, in part, symbolic and does not simply exist as an alternative or separate language.
If Kristeva reaches the body through philosophical explorations, retaining the bodily support of poetic language, Kingston then lets the body speak directly and uses the body as the means for female writing, the fundamental space for dialoguing with the world. In her correspondence with Shirley Lim entitled "Reading Back,
Looking Forward" published in this year's Spring issue of MEL US, Kingston states clearly how body functions as a medium in her writing:
Every word. Every word in everything, including academic papers, I
read it aloud. Because you can feel in your mouth, whether it is pleasant or
unpleasant, angry or leering or whatever, and then you also hear it in your
ear. The whole body goes into this composition.�
Moreover, body, for Kingston, is not limited in a sheer intermediary role. Its
physical ity, as she further elaborates in the same interview, is also associated with a
generative power that seems to provide the source of her feelings and inspirations of
� Ibid.，p. 29.
� Shirley Geok-lin Lim, "Reading Back, Looking Forward: A Retrospective
Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston," MELUS, 33, 1, Spring, 2008, p. 163.
85 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor her writings.
I can feel the intellectual work that is going on. It seems to come from
my head, and sometimes I have to try. There's this feeling of: where does it
come from? Is it the stomach or is it my heart? Or is it coming from my toe
or what? There's a physical ity.�
As Kingston's own remark makes it clear, her body plays a composing part in many of her works. The condition of her body and living (namely age), as she says, directly influences her writing condition:
I feel my aging. When looking back to The Woman Warrior, I read it like
a young woman's book. As times moves on to my writing of China Men and
Tripmaster Monkey, I aged and matured along the writing. Now, as an
elderly, I am aware that there should be further development of ideas
explored and characters formed beforehand; I want to correct my past errors
in previous works and let my characters correct theirs along with me.
Therefore, I read The Fifth Book of Peace as a work of responsible elderly
writer.
As this passage shows, Kingston is always loyal to her life experience and to her body. �It is exactly this faithfulness that enables Kingston to (un)consciously resist
� Ibid.，p. 163.
® Hong Fang', "He Ping, Chen Mo, Xu Shu Ji Qiao—Di Wu He Ping Shu Chuang
Zuo Tan", Dang Dai Wai Guo WenXue, 1, 2008, p. 57.
� As Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty have both similarly expressed, one's body is the
basis of one's life experience. Kingston's loyalty to life experience rather than
86 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor the "formation" of all existing alienating power and orders - including patriarchal system. Her faithfulness also affects her poetic bodily rebellion as a female Asian
American and makes her embrace an originating force from her individual life's sources—writing that is based on the body ultimately embodies the characteristics of the writer's synthesized experiences. The desire and intuition of the body, in this sense, become the impetus of Kingston's writing and provide unique perspectives for her aesthetic observation.
Female Writers, Body Consciousness
Asian American literature has always been concerned with not just racial identity but incarnate body as well. Gender and sexuality are some essential elements and attributes of body. Writers like the Eaton Sisters at the end of Century tend to show the relationship of Asian American body politics to American body politics through expressing concerns that extend beyond race to gender and sexuality.
Relevant examples can be found in Kingston's writing. The two short stories
"On Mortality" and “On mortality again," which are used to end the section "The great grandfather of the Sandalwood" in China Men, are both about man's quest for immortality. Coincidentally, both protagonists' quests end up in failure and their abrupt deaths are incurred as one non-male character speaks up breaking the silence.® The common plot shared by both stories seems to suggest that the
other external things, such as societal value, ideology forms at least illustrate
her emphasis on self experiencing, including experiences through body as a
medium,
� In the first one it is the reborn woman Tu Tzu Chun; in the second one it is the bird
87 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Speech/voice of the Other (women/animal) causes the death and destruction of the male. The hidden message in these two stories seems to be that only the male is privileged to have the rights for speech, articulation and words, while women as the
Other are denied of such rights and should be kept in silence.
This idea that words are a privilege of men can be traced back to its source in a
Western culture tradition, in stories told by the Bible, philosophy, science, literature and history. God speaks the Word to his disciples, Plato to his students, Einstein to other men of science. Klaus Theweleit argues that the male European artist often speaks to other men. In his story of the German writer, Gottfried Benn, he argues that Benn, like many European artists, undertakes the mythic role of Orpheus in order to create, an act that depends on communication between men. "Orphic art production,"® as defined by
Theweleit, is a phenomenon of production found at the root of patriarchal societies. It largely depends on dead women and on living men who create from that death by writing/speaking poetically, transforming death into "Beauty" and “Truth.” In other words, art—which stands as the voice of the "Hu-Man," the eternal "Word," the voice of "God"-has relied on women's dead bodies as material vehicle for imagination and men's immortal voices as means of production. Theweleit tells us that Bonn's story insists that “Real birth, a birth enabling you to see the true realities,
that flight over our protagonist's head while Maui, the trickster is still inside the
goddess's Hina's vagina.
� Klaus Theweleit, "The Politics of Orpheus Between Women, Hades, Political
Power and the Media: Some Thoughts on the Configuration of the European
Artist, Starting with the Figure of Gottfried Benn Or: What Happens to
Eurydice?" New German Critique, 36, Fall, 1985, pp. 133-156.
88 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor can only be gotten by the work of the artist [or of the politician or priest]"; "real" creation, the kind that matters, is the domain of men. He argues that women get to create with their bodies and men with their minds; since bodies die and words live on, the mind is what has value in Western culture.®
For that reason, women writers like Kingston face a particularly stubborn tradition and an inherently "othering" construct. Language of patriarchy is founded
upon exclusion and relying on "the other"~a negative termto generate meaning. As
Cixous observes: "Writing is God. But it is not your God." While Cixous's language,
might be poignant, it expresses the painful experiences of alienation felt and lived by
many women.� For many women including Kingston, writing cannot be thought of
as a possibility, for they have been excluded from (men's) dialogue. It seems to be a dream
or a fantasy: "Write? I didn't think of it. I dreamed of it constantly."® However, as
® I owe this part of analysis on men and women's divide between bodies and words
to Celia Shiffer. See her dissertation '"Writing the Body': Women and Language
in the Novels of Elizabeth Bowen and Jeanette Winterson." Diss. Lehigh
University, 2002.
� Although the work China Men is written mainly based on the history and
experience of Chinese male ancestry, I would like to argue that the alienation
felt and lived by China Men in her writings is a transformation of her own
feeling and experience as a Chinese American woman or say "to get to the point
of view of other people" (Shirley Geok-lin Lim, "Reading Back, Looking
Forward: A Retrospective Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston," MELUS, 33,
1, Spring, 2008, p. 159.)
� Momy Joy, ed. French Feminists on Religion: A Reader (London and New York:
89 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Kingston shows, it can be done一her fantasy becomes reality.
Kingston and a number of French feminists theorists, such as Kristeva, Cixous,
Teresa de Lauretis, turn to the body as a solution for writing, The Bible, the myth of
Orpheus, the story of Benn, all insist that the Word is the gift of the Father to the Son, which, in a sense, comprises a story that has been retold by Freud, who sees little girls as little boys with tremendous lack. Freud's notion of penis-envying woman satisfies a system that relishes and requires her existence. In Teresa de Lauretis's words, however, it is a "passionate fiction" to a great extent: she wants, but she doesn't know what she wants, for she cannot speak it "correctly"; her body can be fetishized (if not dead already, thereby made dead) and appropriated by the voice of the artist. For years, woman is figured not as an active subject who can speak, create, and enact change, but rather as a body that can be filled up (given "life") by the artist's words (his breath, if you will). Thus, for women like Kingston and those female theorists, to write is first of all to fill up her own body (given "life). If women have been denied access to the Word, then women should use their own body as words and space to write.
Kingston's Bodily and Life Experience
In this section, I will explore the relationship of female writer and body with
specific references to Kingston's work. I would like to establish connections between
Kingston as a female writer and her bodily and life experiences.
Sex/sexuality, whether physiological or societal, is first of all undoubtedly a
feature of the body and closely connected to the body. Women are first of all
Routledge, 2001)，p. 228.
90 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
determined as women in terms of body and genes. Therefore, Kingston's writing as a
, woman is consciously or unconsciously restricted by the existence of the female
body. In other words, gender representation that is based on the body and body that is
of gender difference are the common focuses of many Kingston's novels. In this
sense, Kingston's novels are all about a female writer's experiences and perspectives
about female life and female living. Although there are inevitable parts of
representations of male and male-related scenes, her female position and perspectives
stand out in her writing.
Kingston's attempt to return to the body, especially the female body, is a hidden
narrative line inside The Woman Warrior. Take her adaptation of the ancient lyrical
poem Mulan Ci for example: The original focus on the Ancient Chinese legend told a
Chinese woman's heroic deed of concealing her gender and female body to dress like
a man for the sake of filial piety as well as family pride and glory. The Woman
Warrior, however, focuses on almost all the neglected aspects of Fa Mulan's
experiences in the army. By reconstructing and reimagining scenes and plots that are
closely attached to the female body, such as getting married and giving birth to a
baby in the army, Kingston emphasizes female's identification and passion for her
gender and body in her revised version of Mu Lan's story. Moreover, in the telling
example of the "No Name Woman", her aunt escaped from the family house after the
family was raided by the villagers because of the disclosure of her adultery; and she
ran to the empty field and pressed her body against the earth, suffering from the pain
of the forthcoming labor and the gall of the raid. In this case as well as in many other
cases mentioned in the book, the feeling of bodily pain is given prominence in
Kingston's description. The pains of these characters also associated with some kind
of wakening, not only bodily but also mental ones. The awareness of one's bodily
91 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor pains~the growing consciousness of one's body eventually leads to self-awakening from the numbness of the suppression they have once endured.
The representation of Kingston's body and life experiences are most vividly embodied in the textual space of Kingston's creative writings. From The Woman
Warrior to Tripmaster Monkey, these spaces are presented as that of Kristeva's
"chora" where the subject and object are in a chaotic abysm-the intermingling of narrator, author and characters as one. This is indeed one of the means and characteristics of female aesthetics. Susan Gubar in The Blank Page and the Issues of
Female Creativity has explored the issue of female anatomy and creativity. The first characteristic she mentions about female writing is that "many women experience their own bodies as the only available medium for their art, with the result that the distance between the woman artist and her art is often radically diminished.，，�
The absence of this distance is also presented in many other aspects of
Kingston's writing—for instance: the mixture of fictional and non-fictional elements through the intermingling of autobiography and myths, stories and real experiences; the intersection and continuation of plots, characteristics, storylines within her various works. Even in terms of stylistics and language, Kingston's works are also hard to be defined by stereotypical, unified and traditional genre categories, not to mention the prevalent usage of non-literary language inside writing with references to musical elements of rhythms and tempos.
In Kingston's works, the physiology, materiality, gender difference of the body,
� Susan Gubar "The Blank Page" and the Issues of Female Creativity, Feminist
Literary Criticism (New York, NY: Pantheon, 1985), p. 296.
92 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor and especially the tension often become the constitutive and generative elements of her story structures and plots. The adoption of Mu Lan's story, the no name woman and the crazy Mary are only a few examples. Moreover, the existence state of the bodies themselves in her character formations is often the stress point of her images and meaning. Examples to illustrate the point can be found in the androgynous and cross-dressing of Mu Lan in The Woman Warrior and also the alienation and depression of sexuality as depicted by the representation of the body in China Men.
In short, to return to the original status of the body in order to obtain the drive for writing, the "untinted" field of perspective for observing the world are Kingston's major means and strategies of releasing her speaking anxiety as an objectified, marginalized, stereotyped minority writer, and creating her unique writing style.
They are embodied both in her basic writing stance and position and also her selection of themes, material, languages, styles and especially the creation of images.
In the following paragraphs, I will mainly discuss male image formations in China
Men in order to analyze this problem in detail.
2.3 Gaze on the Body-Kingston's Body Writing on Male
Merleau-Ponty has once made a good observation on this topic, which can be
paraphrased as follows: There exists a relationship of gaze and gazed"* between one's
body and the other's body and even the whole world. That is to say, between the
body-subject and object and world, there exits a reversible relationship between gaze
and gazed, touch and touched. In this sense, Kingston's "body-based writing" not
only includes her gaze upon the world from the perspective of a female writer, but
also encompasses the gaze that she has received from the world. More importantly,
between her narrative object and the surrounding world, there exists a convoluted
93 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor and overlapping relationship of seeing and being seen. It is exactly through this relationship that Kingston reveals the tension and conflict between the body and the world.
Objectification: Seeing and Being Seen
Adapted from an eighteenth-century Chinese novel, the brief opening vignette of China Men, "On Discovery," hints in its title at its diacritical relevance to the rest of the book. This marvelous narrative is about a male explorer who is captured and physically transformed into a woman by the inhabitants of the "Land of Women," which seems to be located "in North America" (5). The tale has been read as an allegory of the objectification of Chinese immigrants by American legal and social structures of discrimination.
In his analysis of China Men, Alfred S. Wang discerns "three distinctive patterns of emasculation": "1. personal degradation espoused by society; 2. collective slavery instigated by collective interest group; 3. sexual deprivation sanctioned by law"®.
Based on my reading, however, I would like to make an extension claim that all the three patterns are results of objectification of China Men by institutions and state legislations that justify racial discriminations and violence. Through being objectified and alienated from their body, these immigrant labors are reduced to the white-inferior and even dehumanized states. Kingston also demonstrates through her writings that it is through a return to the body for these Chinese American male subjects that they are able to demonstrate certain resistance to emasculation and
� Cheung King-Kok, Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston,
Joy Kogawa (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 198
94 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor objectification. Similarly, Kingston illustrates that it is also through retaining the body of a female and minority writer that she is able to write against dominance and alienation.
In China Men, Kingston well depicts a brutal Chinese "labor" history on the tens and thousands of Chinese immigrant workers' experiences throughout the
American continent from as early as the second half of the Century. The book refers repeatedly to the forms of violence suffered by these men of Chinese ancestry.
The first and probably the most painful is sexual deprivation. About ninety percent of early Chinese immigrants were male as anti-miscegenation laws and other laws prohibited Chinese laborers’ wives from entering the United States. Therefore, unable to father a subsequent generation, these immigrants were forced to congregate in the "bachelor society" of various Chinatowns a forced. The pain of such denial is most vividly dramatized in the episodes concerning Ah Goong, "Grandfather of the
Sierra Nevada Mountains." Watching the stars one night, Ah Goong "felt his heart braking of loneliness" at the thought that "the railroad he was building would not lead him to his family". (12) His sexual longing intensifies with time; he becomes obsessed with his genitals and often wonders "what a man was for, what he had to have a penis for". (144)
Violence of a more subtle form also comes in the form of menial occupation, enforced invisibility as well as femininity. Many early Chinese immigrants often worked as railroad builder, gold miner, and plantation cultivators in the late 19出 century. Their contributions, however, due to their low and voiceless social status long went unrecognized. Furthermore, because white workers would not brook
Chinese competitors, these Chinamen, Baba (father) and China Joe, were forced to take on traditional "women's work" by becoming cooks, laundry operators, and
95 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor waiters. Edged into such occupations, these men were then ridiculed or exploited for their involuntary "femininity." They are the silenced/voiceless victims of violence formed from social tension and racial as well as sexual discrimination underpinned by formal government legislation and driven to inhumanly heavy labor.
Therefore, in the mutual gaze of the body and the non-body and the tense relationship it thereby produces, Kingston highlights the objectification and alienation of the body and "illegitimate" non-body elements. That is to say, it is through the depiction of the extreme objectification body that Kingston represents the opposition between China Men's world and their surroundings and particularly the absurdity of the surroundings.
Objectified Body—From Body to Flesh
Foucault has analyzed the discipline on the body by the will and ideologies of the state. Kingston, as a female writer, reveals the objectification process of the
China Men from body to flesh and its hidden ideologies.
Violence is essential to the establishment and maintenance of the system of discrimination and exploitation. Violence upon the China Men's body was inherent in the practice of "enslaving" the Chinese coolies as Black slaves. Orlando Patterson's
Slavery and Social Death gives us an analysis of how violence and domination operate on various levels. Patterson defines slavery "on the level of personal relations" as "the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons." He defines slavery as a "relation of domination" with “three sets of constitutive features corresponding to the three facets of power":
The first is social and involves the use or threat of violence in the control
of one person by another. The second is the psychological facet of influence,
96 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
the capacity to persuade another person to change the way he perceived his
interests and his circumstances. And the third is the cultural facet of
authority, "the means of transforming force into right, and obedience into
duty" which, according to Jean Jacques Rousseau, the powerful find
necessary "to ensure their continual mastership•�
Although Patterson's description through the lens of the experience of African slaves, it is believed that given the extreme condition and shared similarities of the
Chinese coolies the definition could also apply to the working conditions of Chinese coolies-what Hugh Tinker has called a new form of slavery. The path to enslavement of these China Men, then, begins with violence upon the body and is maintained with the persisting threat of physical violence. The forced labor system was instituted and maintained by physical violence and the threat of it. For instance, in Hawaii plantations, Chinese laborers were whipped by their white masters for absence from work and even for talking during work. Another level of domination is that of social control, in which psychological and emotional deprivations and limitations impinge on the formation of identity. For instance, Ah Goong contributed greatly in the building of the railroad in America. Literally, he is "the binding and building ancestor of this place," but he had to spend half of his savings on an American citizenship card which, ironically, did not legitimize his stance as a full American citizen, as Ah
Goong still felt the lacking of righteous identity to live as a lawful citizen. The third and "sociopsychological aspect of this unusual power relationship" is a permanent and disabling dishonor; the slave's "tendency to express psychological violence
� Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 2-19.
97 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor against himself: the outward show of self-hatred in the presence of the master, which was prompted by the pervasive indignity and underlying physical violence of the relationship." This final category is one in which the patterns of domination are integrated into the fabric of society and become assumptions. At this level, the master's abuse becomes redefined as his right, and the slave's obedience becomes his duty.
China Men experience objectification via these practices of extreme violence compounded by sexual deprivation and permanent and disabling dishonor. The OED definition states that to "objectify" means to "make into, or present as, an object, esp. as an object of sense; to render objective; to express in an external or concrete form.”
For China Men, being "objectified" and constructed as an "object" means not just the process of being conceptualized as an object of someone's gaze or desire, but also articulates a relationship of consumption of China Men's body as an object.
The objectified China Men body becomes an animate object within the range of the "motionless gaze" of the white enslavers and of the enslaving society at large, at par with the objects of the world, commodities with fluctuating monetary values. The idea to move from being Chinese to being "China Men" meant the objectification of the body and its discursive reduction to "flesh." Hortense Spillers elucidates on the discursive deterioration of the body into "flesh as a primary commodity of exchange" inside the system of slavery. She writes:
I would make a distinction in this case between "body" and "flesh" and
impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated
subject-positions,... If we think of the "flesh" as a primary narrative, then we
98 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
mean its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship's hole, fallen,
or "escaped" overboard.®
According to Spillers's argument, a distinction is made between an human body denoting a subject position and the captive "flesh" with objectification as its defining and "primary narrative." The conceptual, discursive signifying degeneration from
China Men's body to "flesh" is indeed at the crux of objectification for the coolie system.
Objectification as Alienation
Objectification, in Karl Marx's terminology, "is also used in the sense of social relations which transform people into objects rather than subjects."® Marx posits alienation for the worker as referring to "objectification under conditions when the product of a person's labor not only becomes objective to them, but foreign."® Both the objectification of China Men's body and the making foreign not only China
Men's labor but also his own body are experienced as alienation, an alienation from the self. For both Hegel and Marx, alienation is defined as self-alienation, since the
German verbs entaussem and entfremden are reflexive. Alienation, therefore is fundamentally self-alienation. To be alienated is to be separated from one's own essence or nature; and it is to be forced to lead a life in which that nature has no opportunity to be fulfilled or actualized. In this way, the experience of "alienation"
� Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar
Book," Diacritics, Summer, 1987，pp. 67- 75.
® http://www.mandsts.0rg/gl0ssary/terms/0/b.htm#0bjectificati0n.
� http://www.marxists.Org/glossary/terms/o/b.htm#objectification.
99 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor involves a sense of a lack of self-worth and an absence of meaning in one's life.
The alienation of China Men does not only mean that the products of his labor become foreign to his self, but also implies that China Men's body itself is an object that becomes alienated or made foreign to him by virtue of its commodity status.
China Men were suppressed by a slavery that was marked by the complete denial of the slave's bodily integrity. Marx discusses the alienation of the worker by virtue of being engaged in "forced labor":
By revisiting Marx's description through the lens of the experience of Chinese coolies, one can perceive and understand the extreme alienation of them. Given the account of these laborers in Kingston's China Men, one's labor is not only "external" to him--i.e.，does not belong to his essential being-but also literally not his product.
He does not own his own labor. The railroad he built across America--，，the greatest feast of the Nineteenth century" only belongs to the Americans (144). Moreover, the
Chinese laborer "does not confirm himself in his work" but rather is denied himself.
He "does not develop free mental and physical energy.，’ The China man does not possess his very "flesh" that is "mortified," due to the transition from body to "flesh" by virtue of the objectification and alienation. Categorized among other commodities—"On shore among crates, burlap bags, barrels, haystacks, they waited"
(98), these China Men coolies are literally objects. The object that his labor produces--"its product" including the China Men's body-stands opposed "as something alien." The "externalization of the worker in his product means not only that his labor becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently of him and alien to him." "The object confronts him as hostile and alien" and "the worker becomes a slave of his object." In this way, China men' own body and labor become an object with "an external existence" that "exists outside
100 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor him, and independently of him but that it is also alien to him." China Men's existence as a "physical subject" is thus reduced by the extreme objectification and alienation they bear. The culmination of literal slavery is that China Man cannot maintain himself as a physical subject, because he is alienated by both labor and the non-possession of his own body. As a result, he cannot be a physical subject.
Moreover, because he is a corporeal being, or in other words, a being in a body, he cannot escape experiencing reality through his human body. Paradoxically, however, since his body that does not belong to him一it is only an objectified commodity, his existence is reduced to "flesh" that is alienated from himself and hostile to himself-then his consciousness is shaped by these extreme limitations.®
The Objectified Body: A Privileged Position
This extreme form of objectification is experienced as an alienation on the part of the Chinese laborer and as an awareness of himself as an object. The reduction of the China Men's body to flesh and commodity made him aware of his human body as an objective non-body. Slavery and its aftermath entailed this objectification of the slave and the internalization of these alienating experiences. The slave-like experiences and the alienation of body (as self) by slavery or forced labor have constructed China Man as non-human sign. He is not perceived of as human, but as an object, a thing, a commodity with none of the legal, social or cultural rights accorded to humans.
One question that I would like to explore further is about the alienated point of view. If the coolie is "hostile and alien" to his self as body and as labor, does this
® ® http://www.marxists.0rg/archive/marx/w0rks/l 844/manuscripts/labour.htm
101 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor alienation also give rise to a "double-consciousness" and does this objectification paradoxically provide the China Men with a privileged access to reality? What
Fredric Jameson has written about the alienation of the worker and his "privileged" point of view might provide a useful starting point:
...This privileged nature of the worker's situation lies, paradoxically, in
its narrow, inhuman limits: the worker is unable to know the outside world
in a static, contemplative manner...because, even before he posits elements
of the outside world as objects of his thought, he feels himself to be an
object, and this initial alienation within himself takes precedence over
everything else. Yet precisely in this terrible alienation lies the strength of
the worker's position: his first movement is not toward knowledge of the
work but toward knowledge of himself as an object, toward
self-consciousness. Yet this self-consciousness, because it is initially
knowledge of an object (himself, his own labor as a commodity, his life
force which he is under the obligation to sell), permits him more genuine
knowledge of the commodity nature of the outside world than is granted to
middle-class "objectivity." [Emphasis added in bold.]�
Jameson's discussion of class categories and their relation to aesthetics leaves out race and gender, but the constructs of race, class, and gender are inextricably bound in the history of Chinese immigrants in America. The attributes of the peculiarly "privileged" position of the China men to perceive the world suggest a
� Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of
Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 187.
102 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor unique angle of perception in Kingston's writing. Without a doubt, Kingston's literary voice was shaped by the limitations imposed upon it by these violent circumstances. Jameson postulates that "proletarian thought has precisely the capacity for resolving antinomies which middle-class thinking by its very nature was unable to deal with," precisely because of inequalities of power. The "privileged nature" of China Men's situation lies "paradoxically in its narrow, inhuman limits."
For China Men, "even before he posits elements of the outside world as objects of his thought, he feels himself to be an object, and this initial alienation within himself takes precedence over everything else." "[T]his self-consciousness, because it is initially knowledge of an object (himself, his own labor., his life force) permit him
[China Men] more genuine knowledge of the commodity nature of the outside world than is granted to middle-class [the master] "objectivity." In the final analysis, the extreme objectification and alienation, paradoxically, give rise to what has been called a "double-consciousness" and to a distinctive aesthetics.
Body's Spontaneous Resistance: Pain
In China Men, Kingston expresses through her writings that it is through being able to express one's pain that China Men are able to return to the body and resist their objectified and alienated status. Sometimes, Asian plantation workers countered the violence and abuses they suffered with their own violence, directed against overseers and plantation owners. According to Takaki, workers often developed
subtle, ingenious means of resistance, designed to sabotage the smooth operation of the plantation. In various instances they destroyed property, they started fires; they counterfeited script (or payment in kind, to be used only in plantation stores) to
103 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor distribute among workers; they feigned illness and/or injury. In the words of Takaki, they "became skilled practitioners in the art of pretending to be working."® Other avenues of escape from the drudgery of plantation labor and pain of objectification included the use of alcohol and opium, as well as actually running away from the plantations and from their "contracts" (often at the risk of being caught and returned to the plantations). Yet in China Men, Kingston proposes for the literary subjects she creates the return to the body as an ingenious way of resistance.
On his trip to the Golden Mountain, Bak Goong took some opium and conversed
with Lao Tse, the great thinker. Per their conversation, the last question asked by Bak
Goong was:
"How am I going to withstand pain, plain physical hurt?" An accidental
cut could make him say, "I can't bear it." He dug his nails into his arm. How
could he take lonely inevitable death? What about death with pain, pain unto
death? That his body felt content now did not mean that it had learned a
sufficient lesson in the habit of well-being. An urge to touch the ground with
bare feet came over hi, not to have floor-boards or shoes between him and
earth. What if his body had to undergo deliberate torture, for example?
"Don't hurt," he answered himself, or opium, the reminder, answered him.
"Don't hurt," he answered himself, or opium, the reminder, answered him.
"Don't give pain. Don't take pain." The ring of light was disbanding, slivers
of it returning to the carious separate bodies of flesh and bone. "How not to
� Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans
(Boston, MA: Little & Brown, 1998)，p. 144.
104 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
take pain? How to have no pain?" "Be able," he said. "Be capable." Capable.
Opium was merely a rest from constant pain. He said aloud, repeating, "Be
capable," to remember this answer for use later when these unwordable
feelings were gone. “I am a capable man. An able man," he said, and did
feel a touch of dreariness at this mundane answer. He wrapped himself in
his quilt and patted his money belt to feel his sugarcane contract crackle.
"No pain. Don't give pain. Don't take pain.，，(97)
This elucidates the central problem that Bak Goong grapples with during this episode: "How am I going to withstand pain?" when facing the violence he bears.
Other critics tend to interpret the answer that Bak Goong discovers literally as nothing more than simple denials: "Don't hurt.... Don't take pain... No pain，，(95-96).
To feel no pain is to cut the sentient connection between body and emotion/mind. To practice a simple denial of pain through perhaps escaping into the illusionary bosom of opium is for China Men somewhat a self-alienating act of reducing oneself from body to flesh. I argue that the succeeding strings of questions that follow the "No
Pain" quotation should not be neglected. It reads as: “‘Be capable.' Capable. Opium was merely a rest from constant pain. He said aloud, repeating, 'Be capable,' to remember this answer for use later when these unwordable feelings were gone." It is thus through becoming an "able" man that one is capable of not having pain nor taking it. I argue that it is through being able to feel the pain as their bodily impulse and in turn manipulating it that China Men are able to return to the body and thus demonstrate resistance to their objectified and dehumanized state.
In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry asserts:
Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and
105 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language...Physical
pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about
an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and
cries a human being makes before language is learned.®
According to Scarry, then, physical pain remains entirely within the experience of the individual, for it cannot ever be fully, exactly, or explicitly articulated to another person; physical pain cannot be expressed through words and, therefore, is expressed prelinguistically，yet prelinguistic expression resists the interpretation of or
communication with an object outside of the self or an other. Although Scarry speaks
of physical, "material" pain, it seems to me that we can draw a parallel to psychic
pain, for psychic pain is certainly "real" or material to its sufferer. Again, the
boundary between the real and the fictional is slippery at best; psychic pain can affect
its sufferer in such real ways as loss of sleep, inability to act, or even
catatonia-psychic pain can imprint itself on our bodies.
In describing her great grandfather's experiences in Hawaii as a coolie,
Kingston particularly demonstrates his resistance to authority by finding articulations
for his pain. Having signed a contract to come to the Gold Mountain, Bak Goong
becomes a laborer on a sugar plantation. There, it is not the backbreaking work that
makes him suffer, but the rule that laborers are not allowed to talk at work. “I wasn't
born to be silent like a monk," he thinks, claiming that he needs to cast out his voice
to catch ideas (100). Also, he links this silence of the monk to the lack of sexual
� Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 4.
106 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor possibilities available to Chinese men at the time: "Apparently we've taken a vow of chastity too. Nothing but roosters in this flock" (100). He breaks the rule against talking and is whipped. He sings during work, and is fined. It seems that for the enslavers it is not communication among coolies that they are afraid of but what self-articulation evokes. To articulate one's feelings and desires is forbidden because of the subversive power within the expression, and because of the self-consciousness it evokes/brings along.
Finally, because the work has made his breathing difficult, Bak Goong solves the problem of not being able to speak by coughing his thoughts and ideas. "The deep, long, loud coughs, barking and wheezing, were almost as satisfying as shouting" (105). When the overseer beats his horse, he coughs his angry response and, as Hong Kingston notes, "he felt better after having his say. He did not even mind the despair, which dispelled upon his speaking it" (106). This case of Bak
Goong corresponds with our experiences in terms of how language� in a manner could function as a way to unburden ourselves of pain. If language is scarcely an adequate means of escape from pain, at least to some extent its communicative power converges us with someone else-either the imagined audience of a text or the physically present audience of a speech. By helping us to step outside of our own
� The "language" use here in the discussion refers specifically to it as partially a
mean of bodily expression. In many cases in Chinamen, Chinese, the foreign
tongues in Hawaii, is the only language used by these collies for self-expression
when extreme emotions are felt. Losing almost completely its social and
communicative functions in an alien land, it is the very bodily act of expressing
that is valued rather than its semantic contents.
107 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor narcissistic consciences, it makes pain an object that one can manipulate, rather than something one subdues to. Thus by refusing China Men's attempt to articulate their desires and fears- their pain, they were denied of the rights to be observe as autonomous agents. They are rather simply physical corps utterly wrought or consumed with pain. Language promises what seems to be the best means we have to expel or reject whatever hurts us from within; if men are alienated from language, they are again left dangerously close to pain. It is only through the moments of acquisition of language that one—male or female-is able to alienate the pain and becomes its subject. Lacan argues that we acquire language as a way to cope with an existence predicated on loss, and his notion of the symbolic as always already existing dictates that language is the only way by which we can begin to understand anything; it precedes our own existences. Therefore, we come into being, we are made subjects, when we are able to translate felt experience into abstract letters, symbols, sounds and rhythms.
‘The Cartesian dualism of western philosophy separates mind and body and could be traced back to Plato's time. Thereafter, although this Cartesian dualism idea had been time and time again rewritten, its basic mode and idea and value judgment of soul's supremacy and body's abjectness have been preserved and reflect on or lead to a series of categories and relationships such as desire and consciousness, sense and sensibility, divine and secular, common and particular, same and difference, essence and phenomenon. In this sense, it is indeed a revolutionary phenomenon then in the western ideas as it subverts then relative relations and traditional value of mind and body. Starting from the
19th century, Cartesian dualism and its derivative credentials have been widely challenged. If
Nietzsche's famous declaration "God is dead" is a challenge to the predetermined sublimity and supremacy of all metaphysics -consciousness, rationality, divineness, universality, homogeneity and essence, as well as a logocentrism disillusion on which western ideas and systems had relied their
108 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
course; therefore, his claim of" I am body entirely" is not only an affirmation to physical things—desire, sensibility, worldly, peculiar, difference and phenomenon, but also a shift on basic thinking point of the world and ontology to the body—as Merleau-Ponty says- "it is body entirely."
For Nietzsche then the body is mainly of dual sense: 1) natural, material, a living entity with blood and flesh; 2) another is will to life, which is isomorphic to Nietzsche's will to power.
^Like Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty is against the Cartesian dualism and claims to restore the basic thinking point to one's own body (le corps propre). What is different is that Merleau-Ponty's body concept stresses more on the "integration of body and mind." Merleau-Ponty thinks: body is not only a thing, a potential object of study for science, but is also a permanent condition of experience, a constituent of the perceptual openness to the world. "Insofar as I have hands, feet; a body, 1 sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose." (Phenomenology of Perception, 1962, p. 440) Therefore, he brings forth the idea of "bodily subject."
3 The natural body is asymbolic and does not submit under order. It is therefore naturally with a characteristic of a resistance to langue. As I have previously stated: "The first one is represented by
Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze. They stress more on the ‘‘natural body"—body as a living entity with flesh and blood, a habitat of life will and power will (Nietzsche), of perception and conscious activity (Merleau-Ponty), a site of all kinds of desires and forces cross functioning
(Deleuze). Therefore, this type of body is active, energetic, more primal and productive. Its result is that the body keeps on creating parole, subverting langue and transgressing history and challenging all authority and power.
4 The phrase "gaze and gazed" or say "seeing and seen" that is used in this section is what 1 coined to summarize Maurice Merleau-Ponty idea of visual perception as it appears in “The Visible and the Invisible ":
"As soon as I see, it is necessary that the vision... be doubled with a complementary vision or with another vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in the midst of the visible..."
In "Eye and Mind" Merleau-Ponty wrote of the visual perceptions as a sharing, a communion, between what sees and what is seen: "There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen" (167). Merleau-Ponty's definition of representation envelops a strong metaphysical relationship between vision, nature, and art: "Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence of self., it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present at the fission of Being from the inside
-the fission at whose termination, and not before, I comeback to myself (186).
109 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Merleau-Ponty fights the Cartesian model of vision where individuals see the world from an external vantage point, or "God's eye" view and stresses that we as human beings are not dis-embodied eyes looking down upon the world. We are embodied. Therefore, in order to see, we must be in our bodies, in the world. If we are embodied in a shared world, we can be also be seen by those we see. Merleau-Ponty identifies the fundamental "reversibility" in vision: the observer is both
subject and object, the seeing and the seen, the gaze and the gazed.
110 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Chapter Three Return to the Minor
There is nothing major or revolutionary except the minor.
~ Deleuze and Guattari
Julia Kristeva once labeled two main functions of poetry as “restrictive” and
"productive." She also commented that poetry is one of society's most unrestricted,
and to certain extent, most "un-societal" elements. Yet this rebellious force is not
particular to poetry but common to all aesthetic forms. The force derived from the
poetics, is the shared essence of all arts that employ language and words. As Judith
Butler argues in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performatives, "In the place of
state-sponsored censorship, a social and cultural struggle of language takes place in
which agency is derived from injury, and injury countered through that very
derivation.，，� The insurrectionary force or agency of writing as resistance to langue,
in other words, seems to derive from its very position as a minor. The position of
minor is defined as well as empowered by langue (mainstream society, mainstream
political discourse and etc.). The very act of writing as returning to the minor derives
its power/force of existence through citing society's gigantic power system; yet
paradoxically, it is also the very act of citation that generates the insurrectionary
� Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997), p. 41.
Ill Chapter Three: Return to the Minor force to resist and perhaps even reverse the system/langue. In her discussion of
Roland Barthes's idea of writing, Kristeva points out: "There is no language site outside bourgeois ideology. The only possible rejoinder is neither confrontation nor destruction, but only the theft; fragment the old text of culture, science, literature, and change its features according to formulas of disguise.”� What Kristeva attempts to show here is that to admit being a minor and return to the minor, one can gain the possibility of writing as resistance to langue.
In the case of Kingston, the issue of returning to the minor involves a few questions that reflect the limitation and paradoxical nature of minor writings. For minor or minority writers like Kingston, their writings are not only a speech act in an
"other" language but also a seemingly hopeless attempt to create subjectivity, dignity and pride in an injurious speech. The writing motives, strategies and effects of these minor writers could be explained and further explored from the perspectives of theories about speech act and performative. J. L. Austin, the founding father of speech act theory, has pointed out the practicability and constructive power of speech act in terms of creating significations-that is, the starting point for minor speech act to be efficacious in mainstream society and discourse. Critics like Derrida and Butler, however, have emphasized the restrictions that langue has on speech act. These scholars' comments, generally speaking, have indicated the complexity and paradoxical nature of Kingston's work and Asian American writings as a whole in terms of their dilemmas and inner paradoxes.
� Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (New York, NY: Columbia University Press,
1980), p. 108.
112 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
More specifically, writings of ethnic minority writers can be understood as a return to the minor written speech act. This written speech act is of dual nature: On the one hand, it resists langue, focusing on speech, difference,, heterogeneity, individuality and minor position. It attains "new" meanings that are either absent or despised in ordinary language. On the other hand, however, they are inevitably restricted by langue—there exists a tension and even opposition between the speaking subject and the language system-the latter in all means influences and restricts the freedom of speech act, limiting their space for generating new meanings. For Asian
American writers like Kingston, returning to the minor speech act may implicate a paradoxical aesthetical and political action that provokes difference, individuality and minomess, but at the same time, is restricted by homogeneity, collectiveness and majority.
3.1 Speech Act: Another View on Resistance to Langue
Before we discuss Kingston's writing as a return to the minor, let me provide a brief review of speech act and performative theories that will be used in my later analyses. Speech act theory and performative theory first originated from Austin's idea of speech act, which is further developed by theorists like Searle and Butler. The commonality of the two theories is that they not only treated speech and discourse as their focal points but also include speech act as an important research object. In this sense, Saussure's emphasis on langue has been seriously challenged and questioned by these theorists J
Austin: Speech Is Itself a Form of Action
Probably one of the most influential books that Austin has ever written is How to
113 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor do Things with Words. His original ideas of the speech act have later been developed and questioned by numerous scholars such as John R, Searle, Jacque Derrida and
Judith Butler. Judging by its initiation and origins, Austin's speech act theory is a refutation of Saussure's neglect of parole and speech. Austin has once said that if people accept the categorization of parole and langue that Saussure made, he and his colleagues are then far more concerned about the former than the latter.(')
Austin examines not only speech but also discourse. According to Austin, when the legislative phase of language came to an end and people used commonly agreed upon language to discuss the world, we have already shifted from abstract langue form to practical speech, namely from langue to parole.� Austin's concern on
ordinary language and discourse seems to be very natural-he once said: no matter
whether it is philosophy or linguistics, everything have to start with ordinary
language. It is indeed true that parole and discourse are after all linguistic practices.
Therefore, the concept of speech act is of foremost importance, as Austin said: "The
issuing of an utterance is the performing of an action."®
� Mats Furberg, Locutionary and Illocutionary Act (Stockholm, CA: Alongvist &
Wiksell, 1963), p. 68.
� In modern linguistics, discourse as a sheer linguistic object and a relatively
independent oral or written sentence unit that express in particular societal value
level, larger than sentence (parole). Thereby there creates so called another sub
domain of modern linguistics: discourse linguistics and discourse analysis.
� J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1962), p. 6.
114 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
As the issues of parole and discourse have already caught the attention of many scholars, what makes Austin really stand out among the rest is that he has pointed out the performative and constructive value of the speech act itself. Austin defines
"performatives" as follows: (1) Performative utterances are not true or false, that is, not truth-evaluable; (2) The uttering of a performative is, or is part of, the doing of a certain kind of action (cf. Austin 1962, 5).� In this way, ordinary speech in practice turns into performative utterances. Yet performative utterances itself is a speech act.
The action which performative sentences "perform" when they are uttered belongs to what Austin later calls a speech act (more specifically, the kind of action Austin has in mind is what he subsequently terms the illocutionary act).
It is indeed in the speech act that language obtains its significance and in turn causes the change on the surroundings. Therefore the basic claim of Austin's theory of speech act and performative can be expressed through a minor alteration of title of his most influential work How to do things with words: One can do things with words. According to Austin, the use of language including the status of speaking subject and its context could all generate meaning as well as exert influence upon the material world and the real society and culture. As Austin notes, "It is characteristic of perlocutionary acts that the response achieved, can be achieved, entirely by non-locutionary means; thus intimidation may be achieved by waving a stick or pointing a gun." The perlocutionary act can have the force of an object, can stand in for an object, can serve as a surrogate for a physical object and connect with the reality.
� http://en.wikipedia.org/wild/Performative_uttemnce
115 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Indeed, while emphasizing on the performativity of speech act, Austin also sees the counter action of context on speech. In his How to do Things with Words, Austin makes clear that the illocutionary performative derives its forcefulness or efficacy through recourse to established conventions. Once a convention is set, and the performative participates in a conventional formula-and all the circumstances are appropriate-then the word becomes the deed: the baptism is performed, the alleged criminal arrested, the straight couple marries. For Austin, conventions appear to be stable, and that stability is mirrored in a stable social context in which those conventions have become sedimented over time.
In sum, Austin's speech act theory negates the Saussurean semantic mode of binary opposition of signifier and signified. It stresses that on a basis of returning to parole, the practice of parole, including the importance of context of speech in generating significance and influence on the surrounding world. In addition, it also points to the contextual restrictions that a langue (conventions and rules) has on
speech acts. Austin's theory has inspired many followers by drawing their attentions to issues of speech act and problems of performatives. These followers provide
criticisms from various perspectives. Theorists like Searles, Derrida and Butler have
emphasized langue or langue-like elements like prevalent structures, ideologies and
powers, pointing out the constraints of speech act and performative. Although some
of their ideas seemingly call for a return to langue, their studies on the limitation and
restriction of speech act and performatives do contribute to an enrichment and
enhancement of Austin's original theory.
Derrida: "Iterability"
As a critique and response to Austin's theory, Derrida argues that performative
116 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor force resides inside the very structural ity of language itself, derived precisely "from its decontextualization, from its break with a prior context and its capacity to assume new contexts.There is, he says:
...a certain conventionality intrinsic to what constitutes the speech act
(locution) itself, all that might be summarized rapidly under the
problematical rubric of "the arbitrary nature of the sign"... "Ritual" is not a
possible occurrence (eventualite), but rather as iterability，a structural
characteristic of every mark.®
Derrida's critique to this inaugural theory is mainly focused on Austin's usage of conventions and context in his performative theory. In a sense, he further complements it by attending the focus of his discussion to "marginal,"
"nonstandard," "parasitic," "fictional," "literary," "non-serious," and "etiolated" uses of language, �instead of normal and conventional ones as previously emphasized in
� Jacque Derrida, "Signature Event Context," Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 147.
� Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997)，p. 149.
� The sentence length quotation is from p233, Barton, J.C.'s Iterability and
Order-Word Plateau. All of the words in single quotation marks appear in
Austin or Searle as kinds of speech acts which are excluded from their studies.
See Austin's How to do Things with Words, Cambridge, Harvard University
Press, 1962, and Searle's Speech Acts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1969.
117 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Austin's speech act theory.
Specifically in his essay "Signature Event Context," Derrida articulates his theory of the speech act—that is, of iterability to critique and revise Austin's general orientation and methodology. His term of iterability is not only for the "iterable," that is, "the repeatable structure of any mark" but also for "the possibility of any mark to break from its original context and still function as a meaningful sign under entirely different circumstances or within completely new contexts.”® Unlike the exclusive focus on full-blown, explicit performatives around which both Austin and Searle have developed their theories, Derridean performatives/iterability rests on a presupposition of a divided, differential structure of the speech act and a particular attention to the political dimension of a "parasite" language. He cleverly focuses on what Austin excludes from investigation一“parasitism，’ or parasitic discourse.
Instead of claiming them to be logically dependant on standard, "normal" discourse,
Derrida points out that "such 'impurity' does not lie outside language but instead resides within it as 'its positive condition of possibility.，，，�
In a way, iterability "renders possible both the normal rule or convention and its transgression, transformation, simulation or imitation."® Iterability, in a paradoxical
� Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997)，p. 240.
� Jacque Derrida, "Signature Event Context," Limited Inc. (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1988), p. 17. Barton, J.C.'s Iterability and
Order-Word Plateau p. 233
� Ibid.，p. 98.
118 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor sense, makes both rule and transgression, convention and innovation simultaneously accountable for the establishment of laws as well as for the condition that allows for the laws to be contested, resisted or flouted. Thus in terms of practical usage, iterability concerns not just the uses of language to implement or contest laws and social codes, but it also highlights the fact that the "reiterative enactment or performance of such laws and codes perpetuates certain notions of identity and normality." In this respect, the parasitic effects of iterability can function as a mode of political intervention, a way of transgressing rules and social norms. As Derrida writes: "The parasite parasites the limits that guarantee the purity of rules and of intentions, and this is not devoid of import for law, politics, economics, ethics, etc."
①
Judith Butler ： A Politics of the Performative
Butler has been inspired by Derrida's idea of iterability. In Bodies That Matter:
On the Discursive Limits of "Sex, “ Butler works out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability, a form of citationality, emphasizing the role of repetition in performativity:
Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a
regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not
performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and
constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies
that "performance" is not a singular "act" or event, but a ritualized
� Ibid.，p. 98.
119 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and
through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and
even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I
will insist, determining it fully in advance.®
Butler does not fully agree with Derrida's idea on the place where the performance force derives. Butler decides to reject both Bourdieu's theory of performative force derived from social authority, on the grounds of its political quietism, and Derrida's theory of performative force derived from the structure of language, on the grounds of its "excessively formal interpretation of the performative. �Each lacks some component of the "social iterability" �that she desires. At first she attempts to resolve this problem by marrying Bourdieu with
Derrida through bringing Bourdieuan habitus together with Derridaian iterability.
Arguing that interpellation functions by way of iterationcalling subjects into being, yet never succeeds in fully reproducing them, she sees interpellation as a process that requires continuous and iterative performances. This continualness of the social interpellation in a way, as she argues，hits o n the limitations of the very speech acts which interpellate the subject (otherwise they would not need to be repeated) and in turn opens a space for resistance and subversive agency. In order to make her case,
Butler specifies the body as the site of resistance:
� Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex “ (New York,
NY: Routledge, 1993), p. 95.
� Ibid.，p. 151.
� Ibid., p. 150.
120 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
The body, however, is not simply the sedimentation of speech acts by
which it has been constituted. If that constitution fails, a resistance meets
interpellation at the moment it exerts its demand; then something exceeds
the interpellation and this excess is lived as the outside of intelligibility. This
becomes clear in the way the body rhetorically exceeds the speech act it also
performs. This excess is what Bourdieu's account appears to miss or,
perhaps, to suppress: the abiding incongruity of the speaking body, the way
in which it exceeds its interpellation, and remains uncohtained by any of its
acts of speech.®
Moreover, Butler turns to a psychoanalytic account of the bodily speech act, one which she had discussed in her introduction: "the 'force' of the speech act, as it was articulated by Shoshana Felman, Felman has everything to do with the status of speech as a bodily act."® She finds in Felman an argument against the exclusive focus on linguistics in Austin's speech-act theory, an argument which helps her claim that speech acts have bodily consequences. Butler reads Felman as saying that "the speech act is a bodily act, and ... the 'force' of the performative is never fully separable from bodily force ... the speech act [is] at once bodily and linguistic.’，�
In the above paragraphs I have provided a simple retrospection of speech act and performative relevant theories from Austin to Derrida and Butler. One can see that their theories are inter-connected and each of them has individual focuses and
� Ibid.，p. 155.
� Ibid.’ p. 152.
� Ibid., p. 141.
121 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor paradoxical places. From my point of view, their differences serve as complements for the interpretation of speech act and performative problems providing special angle and methods for each. And these methods and angles provide a wide angle and comprehensive framework for us to understand Kingston's return to minor writing as a written speech act and especially the complexity of returning to the minor speech act.
3.2 The Revolt of Minor Tongue: On Language Appropriation
Deleuze and Guattari once said:
There has been much discussion of the questions "What is a marginal
literature?" and "What is a popular literature, a proletarian literature?"...
Only the possibility of setting up a minor practice of major language from
within allows one to define popular literature, marginal literature, and so on.
Only in this way can literature really become a collective machine of
expression and really be able to treat and develop its content.�
In fact, Kingston's writings, especially The Tripmaster Monkey, in terms of its motives, strategies and affects, can all be generally read as basic speech acts and performatives of returning to the minor through "thefting" the major. As Kingston herself explains in a interview:
I am in the tradition of American writers who consciously set out to
create the literature of a new culture. Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Gertrude
� G Deleuze, and F. Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minneapolis Press, 1986), p. 17.
122 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Stein, the Beats all developed ears for dialect, street language, and
experimented with how to make written language sound like spoken
language. The content of that language is the ever-changing mythology. I am
writing American mythology in American language.�
We began by noting that linguistic representations of Asian Americas-pidgin, as presented in Kingston's writing of Tripmaster Monkey, calls into question their linguistic agency. The agency, which is represented as incapable of using standard language, can be site of injury. Pidgin English-a minor tongue, however, produces a sense of agency from ambivalence and a set of effects that exceed the animating intentions of the call. My analysis of the text below will demonstrate that by taking up the minor tongue that one is associated with no simple submission to prior authority, for language is already unmoored from prior context, and enters into the labor of self-definition. The words and language thus become an instrument of resistance in the redeployment that destroys prior territory of its operation.
Performing a "Twin Skin”
In reading Tripmaster Monkey, the reader experiences different linguistic phenomena in which the multiplicity and complexity of characters' languages are recorded. While using predominately Standard English in Chinese characters' speeches in The Woman Warrior and China Men, Kingston reveals a possession of more linguistic and rhetorical freedom in the writing of Tripmaster Monkey.
� Maxine Hong Kingston, Paul Skenazy, and Tera Martin. Conversations with
Maxim Hong Kingston. (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), p.
161.
123 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Like many writers such as Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein and Toni Morrison, who write about the life and culture of traditionally marginalized groups, Kingston continues to follow the road of attending to and representing the unique language of oppressed characters. She adopts distinctive forms of English that mirror her characters' (Chinese immigrants') varying social and linguistic backgrounds, acutely aware of the need to represent their languages in her work as truthfully as possible in order to recreate the social and cultural reality for her characters. This experimentation with new ways of representing Chinese immigrants' languages is precisely what Kingston does in Tripmaster Monkey. By retrieving the unique linguistic tradition among Chinese Americans, she attempts to seek a new way of using language that will reflect and define the identities of "her people."
Gloria Anzaldua in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza expresses very well a similar need, when she reflects on the roles of languages in the life of Chicano
Americans:
For a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which
Spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which
English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who
cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor
standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their own
language? A language which they can connect their identity to, one capable
of communicating the realities and values true to themselves®
� G. Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco. CA:
Aunt Lute Books, 1987), p. 55.
124 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Sharing Anzaldua's concern, Kingston in Tripmaster Monkey uses pidgin
English in Chinese immigrants' dialogues to reflect language and life in Chinatown.
In the foreword to Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii 's Local Writers, she states that
Chinese Immigrant pidgin English (CIPE) is "the language used at home, the language of childhood and the subconscious, the language used in emotion' and
'must be spoken for full beauty and power.，,� It offers a viable avenue for Chinese immigrants to affirm their self-identities and to develop a sense of community among themselves.
Specifically, CIPE as discussed by Juan Li takes cues from Hall's definition of the word. Described as "the syntactically and phonologically reduced English spoken by Chinese immigrants whose native language is Chinese，，，� it serves as a type of lingua fracas used for communication by Chinese immigrants living in the United
States. According to her descriptions of the systematic account of its linguistic features done by Reinecke and Tokimasa: "CIPE chief syntactic features are omission of auxiliaries, use of pronouns deviating from standard English usage and use of a predicate with a subject implied from context®; main phonological features are characterized by the elision of sounds, interchanges of vowels such as [i] and [I],
� Maxine Hong Kingston, Foreword, Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii 's Local
Writers (Honolulu, HI: Petronium Press, 1978), p. 6.
� Juan Li, "Pidgin and Code-Switching: Linguistic Identity and Multicultural
Consciousness in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Language and
Literature, 13, 3，August, 2004, p. 273.
� Reinecke and Tokimasa^ 1934, pp. 124-128.
125 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
[ I] and [e], [� jan] d [!：；], and the dropping of word final [d] and [t].®"
Examples of Kingston's treatment of CIPE are rendered most colorful in conversations between Witman's mother, Ruby, and her friends in Chinatown and yet not restricted to older generation of Chinese immigrants alone. When Witman introduces Tana, his Anglo bride, to his mother and aunties who are celebrating a mah-jong day, the ladies talk to Witman in CIPE: '"Oh, I be sorry I didn't recognize you, Witman' ... 'You so changed' ... ‘He was a cute biby.’ 'Why you not visit
Auntie more often?' 'Me too, honey boy. Visit you Aunt Sondar too.' ... ‘Wit Man
Big city guy now，，，(180). When a homely young girl approaches him on the bus, she pronounces her destination Oakland as "Oak Lun"(73). When the young wife of
F.O.B. attempts to coax her kid into eating Chinese food, she said "Good Eating,
Good Eats" (5).
As Li Jun analyzes in "Pidgin and Code-Switching: Linguistic Identity and
Multicultural Consciousness in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey"'.
The dropping of word final [d] or [t] in "Oak Lun"; the omission of a
copula in "Wit Man Big city guy now" as well as "Good Eating, Good Eats";
lack of be-inflection in “I be sorry"; "you" used as a pronoun for the second
person possessive in "you Aunt"; and omission of the indefinite article a
before "Big city guy."®
� Ibid.，p. 130.
� Juan Li, "Pidgin and Code-Switching: Linguistic Identity and Multicultural
Consciousness in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Language and
Literature, 13，3，August, 2004, p. 280.
126 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
In these conversations, Kingston recording of language is indeed a mimic of actual CIPE utterances. Through such a faithful delineation of Chinese immigrants' life and language, she introduces some authenticity and liveliness to Chinatown speeches and brings the reader into close contact with the reality of a bilingual, multidialectal Chinese American constituency. In doing so, she ingrains into her writing the necessity of giving voice to the ways of speaking that have long been ignored and obscured by forces of linguistic oppression and domination by the monolingual culture. The rhetorical and linguistic freedom enables the linguistic and cultural backgrounds of her characters to be more effectively expressed. More importantly, by giving them a language that is congenial to them and pervasive in their daily life in American reality, Kingston features Chinese Americans as speaking subjects of their own desires and concerns. Compared with Kingston's translation of her characters' Chinese into English in The Woman Warrior as an attempt to make linguistic and cultural adjustment, her act of imitating CIPE speech in Tripmaster
Monkey serves to "authorize" her Chinese characters towards a model of self-recognition. Like Anzaldua who views her language "twin skin" of her
self-identity®, Kingston "performs" a "truer" Chinese American identity through the quest for a "truer" language.
The Stereotypical Linguistic Reality
The idea of recording "a truer language" is however under doubt when one
further examines its presented linguistic reality as well as the generated effect. CIPE
� G Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco. CA:
Aunt Lute Books, 1987), p. 59.
127 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor that serves as the "twin skin" for one's self-identification and empowerment is also vulnerable from possible alienation and stereotyping. Precisely because CIPE reveals
Chinese immigrants' linguistic identities, it simultaneously functions as a linguistic marker isolating them from the mainstream culture and introduces negative stereotypes to the language and its speakers. In the telling case, we see Wittman and
Nancy Lee, both Berkeley English majors and American-bom Chinese, often denied the access to the dominant language and culture because of their Chinese appearances. As an English major aspiring to be a playwright, Wittman is enraged at the white assumption that Chinese Americans cannot use standard English: "the one
[question] that drives me craziest is 'Do you speak English?' particularly after I've been talking for hours, don't ask 'Do you speak English?' The voice doesn't go with the face ..." (317). Witman's bafflement at the linguistic oppression of Chinese
Americans is echoed by Nanci Lee, a Berkeley beauty queen of Chinese descent, who comments that “[a]s if this language didn't belong to us ... I have to speak in a way I've worked hard not to speak like" (24-5). The "twin skin" idea of language becomes eventually a double-edged sword that, on one hand, serves for
Chinese-American self-identification, but on the other hand, implies the speakers' • inescapable fates of being categorized into "a notional periphery of deviancy in the moral universe."®
The broken structures and variant spellings of CIPE, after all, are still regarded
� Juan Li, "Pidgin and Code-Switching: Linguistic Identity and Multicultural
Consciousness in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Language and
Literature, 13，3, August, 2004, p. 283.
128 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor as "parasitic" to "normal" usage of English. Widely recognized as a substandard language used only by the "underclass" in American society, the strategy of empowerment through such a language becomes paradoxical. The low status association of CIPE is revealed by the condescending attitudes of society's feedback.
As in the opening scenes of the book, Wittman Ah Sing ponders suicide on a bridge.
He observes a family of "uncool" immigrants who are "fresh off the boat" in his contemplation:
The F.O.B. stepped aside, following, straggling, came the poor guy's
Wife. She was coaxing their kid with sunflower seeds, which she cracked
with her gold tooth and held out to him. "Ho sick, la. Ho sick," she said.
"Good eating. Good eats." Her voice sang, rang, banged in the
echo-chamber tunnel. Mom and shamble-legged kid were each stuffed
inside of about ten homemade sweaters. Their arms stuck out fatly. The
mom had on a nylon or rayon pantsuit...
The whole family taking a cheap outing on their day offu. Immigrants.
Fresh Off the Boats out in public. Didn't know how to walk together.
Spitting seeds. So uncool ... F.O.B. fashions - highwaters or puddlecuffs.
Can't get it right. Uncool. Uncool. The tunnel smelled of mothballs - F.O.B.
perfume. (5)�
� The same two passages are analyzed by Li Juan at length in "Pidgin and
Code-Switching: Linguistic Identity and Multicultural Consciousness in Maxine
Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Language and Literature, 13, 3, August,
2004, pp. 288-290.
129 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
In this initial passage, Kingston has Wittman dramatize the physical features and
language of the new immigrants by deliberately orientalizing them. The new
immigrants' bodies-"shambled legs", "gold teeth" and "homemade sweaters" become objects of mockery. Their "foreignness" is further supplemented by a depiction of their pidgin English, the verbatim translation of the wife's utterance in
Cantonese "Ho sick, la. Ho sick" [It tastes good, it tastes good] is rendered into CIPE expression "Good eating. Good eats" with the characteristic copula deletion and subject omission. Wittman's sarcastic observation of the new immigrants' bodies and
CIPE at the beginning of the novel therefore epitomizes the condescending attitude the dominating culture® has toward Chinese immigrants and their language.
Insurrectionary Speech Act: Towards a "Parasitic" Language
Initially, the mimetic representation of CIPE in the hope of referring to and depicting the "true" language of Chinese American subjects would seem to offer a
useful antidote to previous stereotypical presentation as well as abstraction of these
subjects. However, such an attempt to "reiterate" Asian American language in an
accurate manner, particularly through the use of a certain set of syntactic and
phonetic feature characteristics of language, actually distances it from verisimilitude.
Instead of undoing stereotypes that are faulted for reducing and ignoring the
� This example illustrates Wittman's early illusionary identification with the
society's dominating culture and groups. The early part of the writing reveals
Wittman's attempts to connect himself with the dominating groups (mainly
Caucasians) through adopting their condescending attitudes towards the new
immigrants, whom he had been commonly associated with.
130 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor complexity of Chinese American experiences, what passes for a "real" and "truer" language might only be based on a particular set of experiences which has been generalized to cover all Chinese Americans.
Apart from imitating a "real" language, Kingston also renders a "parasitic" language that is able to break away from the conventional context of a non-standard
English which implies its speakers' ignorance, ill-breeding as well as stupidity. As demonstrated in the aforementioned analysis of Butler and Derrida, the act of repetition and resignification contains the promise for recontextualization and subversive redeployment. More specifically, it enables an injurious speech to include the possibility of its own subversion and a counter-tradition interpretation of speakers of non-standard language as intelligent and independent-minded. Such an assertion of counter-tradition lies at the heart of Kingston and her protagonist's systematic examination of the status of language.
At the end of the opening chapter of Tripmaster Monkey, Wittman explains an episode from his play in which the character Dr Woo, a Chinatown doctor, speaks in this 'parasitic' language as he is advertising his medicine:
You hurt? You tired? Ah, tuckered out? Where you ache? This medicine
for you. Ease you sprain, ease you pain. What you wish? You earn enough
prosperity? Rub over here. Tired be gone. Hurt no more. Guarantee! Also
protect against accidental bodily harm. And the law. Smell. Breathe in deep.
Free whiff. Drop three drops - four too muchee, I warn you — into you
lady's goblet, and she be you own lady. Make who you love love you back.
Hold you true love true to you. Guarantee! Guarantee! (14)
As Li Juan's states in her analysis of Kingston's use of code-switching and
131 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor pidgin English in Tripmaster Monkey, Dr Woo's speech contains the following major
CIPE features documented by linguists: consistent omission of copulas, interrogative clauses with the same word order as statements as in "You hurt?", lack of verb inflection as in "Tired be gone," omission of auxiliaries as in "Where you ache" and
"What you wish" and use of a predicate without a subject as in "Ease you sprain."®
Yet Kingston's rendering of these actual CIPE features serves more than the mere purpose of grounding Dr. Woo's speech in empirical reality. Take the phrase "too muchee" as an example. Kingston adds the stereotypical -e'e ending to highlight the
"Chineseness" of his speech and creates a stereotypical situation with Dr Woo. A similar example can also be found towards the end of Wittman's monologue in the book, when he recounts a story in which the character Wellington Koo responds to a mockery of Chinese Americans' language with a direct attack on negative views of it:
Koo was talking to his dinner partners, the ladies on his left and right,
when the diplomat across from him says, "Likee soupee?" Wellington nods,
slubs his soup, gets up, and delivers the keynote address. The leaders of the
free world and their wives give him a standing ovation. He says to the
diplomat, "Likee speechee?" After a putdown like that, would you think Mr.
and Mrs. Potato Head would stop saying, "You speakee English?" (317-18)
In both these examples the stereotypical -ee ending becomes the butt of jokes
and is then turned into an attack on negative stereotyping of Chinese Americans'
� Juan Li, "Pidgin and Code-Switching: Linguistic Identity and Multicultural
Consciousness in Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey," Language and
Literature, 13，3, August, 2004, pp. 280-283
132 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor language. As Li Juan has pointed out that since the -ee ending is no longer found in current CIPE, Dr. Woo's and the diplomat's use of this feature here reflect stereotypical rather than real understanding of CIPE. In both Dr Woo and Koo's speech it reflects the wit, humour and sarcasm Kingston attempts to create of the
Chinese immigrants. In giving the reader a sweeping look at their speeches' low status. Kingston has Koo and Woo fight against negative stereotypes of CIPE and the social, linguistic and psychological oppression of Chinese Americans.
The cases above-mentioned demonstrate the possibility for Asian American's humorous imitation of CIPE failing to lapse into stereotypes. Together with the word
"queer" in queer theory and the "n-word" in certain African-American discourse communities, parasitic languages CIPE have broken from their originally derogatory contexts and have been appropriated and charged with quite different meaning and uses through what Derrida calls "parasitic effect of iterability" within contemporary politics. As explicitly expressed by Wittman in an attempt to imitate Dr Woo's
language, Witman says that "Show the bok gwai that Chinese-Ah-mei-li-cans are human jess likee anybody elsoo, dancing, dressed civilized, telling jokes, getting boffo laffs. We got rhythm. We got humor" (15). By dramatizing the characteristic accent of CIPE and using stereotypical situations with Dr Woo, Witman and
Wellington Koo in their respective expressions of wisdom and decrying of prejudicial notions against Chinese Americans, Kingston creates a new vision that perceives CIPE speakers as intelligent and quick-witted rather than thoughtless or
inarticulate. Thus, a "parasitic" English in Tripmaster Monkey does not merely record or reflect Chinese immigrants' speech, but also actively "performs" new
linguistic as well as social/cultural identities for Chinese Americans. Drawing on
Deleuze and Guattari's study of minority literature, David Leiwei Li claims in his
133 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
Study of Asian American literary tradition that English as the Asian American lingua franca exemplifies what those French critics characterize as "the deterritorization of language": In inheriting a language not their own, Asian Americans have so appropriated, challenged, and colored English that it is made into a minority literary agency in the redefinition of the nation.� The unity of language is fundamentally
"political," as Deleuze and Guattari assert in "Postulates of Linguistics." Refusing to unify language under the banner of a dominant, mother tongue, Kingston here, like
Derrida, through her linguistic play shows not only how iterability generates meaning through repetition with a difference but also reveals the possibility to contest, resist or flout established and codified rules and social codes, to dispose the hierarchical oppositions of normal/deviant, major/minor.
3.3 One Man Play: On Minor Writing as Felicitous Political Speech-Acts?
Henry Louis Gates, JR. once remarked on the effect of speech act：
Yes, speech is a species of action. Yes, there are some acts that only
speech can perform. But there are some acts that speech alone cannot
accomplish. You cannot heal the sick by pronouncing them well. You cannot
uplift the poor by declaring them to be rich.
Speech act theory is indeed a political theory, a judgment in the linguistic political field on whether linguistic utterance can be turned into social reality. The key to its judgment of whether speech could perform an act~"what gives a linguistic
� David Leiwei Li, Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural
Consent (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1998), p. 29.
134 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor utterance the force to do what it says, or to facilitate a set of effects as a result of what it says" (146), lies in whether the speaker bears the necessary authority/force to legitimize the very act. Thus "how an invocation that has no prior legitimacy can have the effect of challenging existing forms of legitimacy, breaking open the possibility of future forms" (147) determines minor literature's efficacy (including minorness in all aspects: ethnicity, politics and gender) as a successful speech act. It is then open to doubt how the oppressed can gain their rights to voice a resistance to langue, to oppose what indeed holds power and authority, given their own underprivileged status. Thus, for Kingston and other minor writers, literary writing as a speech act is not merely associated with aesthetic values but also political ones.
In other words, minor literature as a speech act has in-born political values. Minor literature as an aesthetical creation, a speech act, therefore, can efficaciously shift from aesthetics to politics, or to say the efficaciousness of minor writing as a speech act to resist the Langue is my discussion focus in this section. Moreover, this part will also to a certain extent serve as a concluding section for my thesis. In Tripmaster
Monkey, the protagonist Witman Ah Sing intends to perform into existence through a communal play his idea of an idealized Asian American Community. Similarly, I have explored the relationship between performative, minor literature/minor aesthetics and politics; and my discussion highlights Kingston's writing as a process of resistance to langue and its limitation and potential paradox.
While in the previous section we have analyzed Kingston's usage of parasitic language to engender an ethico-political act that is able to deconstruct the dominant social structures and contexts ascribed to Asian Americans/Asian American writings and in turn perform" a new linguistic/social/cultural identity. Yet one must also pay attention to the fact that such a redeployment in the form of "parasitic" language
135 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor means speaking words without prior authorization and in turn risking the security of linguistic life, the sense of one's place in language-- one's words do as one says. This risk, however, has already arrived with injurious language as it calls into question the linguistic survival that it addressed. "The act of insurrectionary speech becomes the necessary response to injurious language, a risk taken in response to being put at risk, a repetition in language that forces change." (1997: 163) Significantly, Butler reserves the power of such insurrectionary speech for those who have been the objects of injurious speech, the marginalized or abjected: “agency is derived from injury, and injury countered through that very derivation" (1997: 41). For such specially empowered yet abjected subjects like the Asian Americans/Kingston, the performative engagement with the convention is described as producing calculable effects (commensurate with the intention of the performer) upon a given social context.
A Performance of Identity Politics
Tripmaster Monkey can be read as a novel of Kuenstlerroman, a story of
Wittman Ah Sing's pursuit of his own artistic voice. It depicts Wittman's struggle to reconcile the battling binaries of individual and communal subjectivity through highlighting problems endemic to the issue of racial identity in contemporary
American society. Throughout the narrative Wittman oscillates between a
Chinese-identified self-concept and an American-identified one, between Chinese heritage and American nationality. Saddled with paranoia and self-doubt, he shifts uncertainly between his roles as an adventurous monkey king and community leader, the isolated and the integrated. It is only through Wittman's final artistic production~a communal play, including the additional voices of myriad other textual participants that he is enabled to create an artistically synthesized whole in which
136 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor these antonyms reach harmonic resolution.
Kingston's own writing style reveals the same belief in communal production.
Continually accruing a greater mass of narrative participants, Kingston's text
snowballs as it progresses. The power of her protean vision lies in this emphasis on collaborative work- art made possible only through collaborative speech-acts.
Similarly, Kingston emphasizes her indebtedness to myriad authors and acquaintances for the production of Tripmaster itself at the end of the novel. By expressing her gratitude towards all those provided stories, narratives, and fragments now interwoven in her text, she "performs" a collaborative artistic speech-act using her writing.
Adapting such a multivocal style in Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston is also concerned with the idea of representation with focus on contemporary issues of
identity politics. In both form and content, Kingston's work suggests an idealized
America of constantly-blurring boundaries. Tripmaster Monkey shifts fluidly between the genres of play and prose, emphasizing the potential to perform
Kingston's notion of racial identity politics--an ideal of unity through inclusive diversity. Specifically she advocates that multiculturalism is an integral component of American identity, and that all of the nation's voices must be heard. Performance then becomes the key technique for Kingston to reconcile this paradoxical
fascination of difference-yet-sameness, with the importance of variety-yet-unity.
As the author, Kingston employs drama as an act of presenting and representing as well as a declarative performative utterance on her notion of minority identity as a solution for American politic dissonance. By taking the words from her own mouth and putting them into the mouths of her characters, Kingston uses Theater to
137 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor give literal voice to a set of especially those underrepresented ones from ethnic minority groups. For her, narrative creates a framework in which peaceful coexistence of individual and communal identity and equal treatment of various ethnic groups are a realized literary possibility. More importantly, as every performance necessitates or at least implies an audience, the audience, real or textualized, brings the narrative outside the author, and into a wider sphere. For instance, the narrative of Wittman's play is framed and contained by that of an omniscient third-person narrator, who interrupts Wittman's solipsistic soliloquies with remarks and invitations directed toward the reader. Moreover, characters with different perspectives, often conflicting in terms of race, faith, political affiliation, etc., can also voice their disputes within the text and simultaneously provide a locus of connection between author and readers/viewers. Kingston text serves as a site for the literalization of American multiculturalism.
Minor Writing: A Site for Felicitous Performance?
Although Kingston presents multivocal art as a solution to America's political dissonance, the actual efficacy of text as an aesthetically privileged space where words can be translated into deed is still open to question. The significance of text as a site for declaration of a Utopian identity politics is that it is located specifically within the realm of the textual. The power of language to talk something into existence-word magic, may only have what it constructs in language or in writing.
In Tripmaster Monkey, Kingston uses the format of a communal play to convey her ideal of a multi-culturalism/multi-cultural society. While the multivocality of the play as performed by its sundry casts, characters parodying its literary referents
138 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor appear succeedingly throughout the play. The play itself it is a literal performance of the each stage development of Asian American Literature which is characterized and separated by shifting periods of assimilation and separatism.
Yet while such "a Utopian balance between assimilation and separatism flourishes in art,"® the novel continuously hints on fissures between literary creation and societal reality. As Lara Narcisi points out in her "Wittman's Transition",
"Kingston never truly palliates the lingering racial tensions situated in America."
Her example of Wittman's observation on the consistently unjust treatment of blacks in America demonstrates:
These black French must have lately arrived from one of those colonial
places. Their faces were not chary and wary; they were not "friendly," or
"bad," or "loose." Their long a hands and fingers wafted through a gentler
atmosphere. Give them a few more weeks among the Amerikans; we'll
show them how far tres joli manners get them, and how much respect with
Saturday Review tucked under the arm. They will tighten up their act. Turn
complicated. (22)�
In Narcisi's analysis of the paragraph above, she remarks that Kingston "in the face of persistent racism proposes text-in the form of both novel and play--is merely one
� Lara Narcisi, "Wittman's Transition: Multi vocal ity and the Play of Tripmaster
Monkey," MEWS, 30，3，Fall 2005’ p. 101.
� This is a passage analyzed by Lara Narcisi at length in "Wittman's Transition:
Multi vocal ity and the Play of Tripmaster Monkey," MEWS, 30, 3, Fall 2005,
pp. 102-103.
139 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
means of creating a 'temporary' space; it does not censor 'tre joli manners' or force
categorizations of 'friendly,' or 'bad,' or 'loose,' but instead enables true multivocal
expression." Moreover, she points out that this idea of implied break between factual
reality and literal truth is further illustrated in the massive four alarums fire finale.
After almost three full pages of description on the conflagration at the climax,
emphasizing on its destructive force that shatters the thin walls between reality and
illusion, Kingston's narration takes a shape turn on the following page with a
complete denial of previous "reality": "Of course, Wittman Ah Sing didn't really
burn down the Association House and the Theater. It was an illusion of fire" (304).
The grandiose "Chinese Fire" like the very Utopian world envisioned by the "black
French" is merely an illusionary reality that functions only on the printed page, in text itself，"where words alone are verification or denial of pyrotechnics." In the real
world, such delightful blurriness between the real and the illusive evanesces; "a fire
exists or it doesn't."
These evidences of implied break between the literal truth and the factual reality
call into question the possibility for text to serve as a site for felicitous performance
of political resistance. The felicity of a declarative speech act is determined by what
Derrida calls "the politics of iterability." Derrida exemplifies this term in his reading of the American Declaration of Independence, a founding political document that
incorporeally transforms a then cluster of British colonies into a sovereign nation. As
John Barton's analysis of reading goes:
For Derrida, the question of "who signs and with what so-called proper
name, the declarative act which founds an institution" problematises both
the agent and the event supposedly brought or "ordered," so to speak, into
being. For on the one hand, the declaration wholly produces the "good
140 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
people" of the United States in whose name it speaks, precisely because it
comes before the existence of the country and people as such; while on the
other hand, the proclamation itself presupposes the existence of these "good
people" to make the declarative utterance in the first place.®
Following his analysis, the logic of Kingston/Wittman's speech acts suffers from
a very similar flaw. Kingston's text/Witman's play as a declarative speech act of a
"revolutionary" minority identity politics is coextensive with the foundation of the
very authority which supposedly authorizes it. The legitimacy of that act always
remains open to question when Kingston's text/Wittman's play wholly produces the
revolutionary performative authority/force from which the proclamation itself speaks.
This undecidable tension between founding and conserving act of a revolutionary
performative is what Derrida calls "the politics of iterability."
Specifically, Wittman believes that he can "perform" a community, an
self-authorizing power for the underprivileged, "unqualifiable," "unrelated," ^ through the communal verbal act of imagining, practicing and re-creating. On one
hand, the text seems to agree with this ideal through the emphasizing of its word
magic, while on the other hand it displays its fissures and cracks implying "such
sights exists exclusively through the eye of imagination.” �Despite Wittman's
� J. C. Barton, "Iterability and the Order-Word Plateau: 'A Politics of the
Performative' in Derrida and Deleuze/Guattari," Critical Horizon, 4, 2, 2003, p.
248.
� Lara Narcisi, "Wittman's Transition: Multivocality and the Play of Tripmaster
Monkey," MELUS, 30, 3，Fall 2005, p. 102.
141 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor attempt of a communal play and Kingston's final page dedication to co-authorship, the emphasis on the illusoriness and fakeness of the "reality" and textuality of the text force the reader to acknowledge Wittman's/Kingston's very own authority. Such acknowledgement however ultimately leads the writings into a dilemma between "a principle of resistance" and "a force of resistance."
A politics of iterability is "an interpretive act of reading or a social practice of doing which positions itself against a sovereign authority as a principled act of resistance."® But the force of resistance, as Derrida asserts, ultimately calls for the
"deconstruction of the concept of unconditional sovereignty.，，� Borrowing Derrida's discussion of University without Condition, Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey, as a text of a minority writer, is hardly a site for truly efficacious political resistance.
It does not enable eventual efficacious political resistance since the presence of
Kingston's authorial power as a minority writer still depends in certain definite ways upon the various forms of "sponsorship" of the very sovereign authority it act against
(for instance, a State, a private institution, or even simply publishing industry, public tastes). As a minority writer, one is thus ever faced with an absence of "an unconditional freedom to question and to assert, or even going still further, the right to say publicly all that is required by research, knowledge, and thought concerning
� J. C. Barton, "Iterability and the Order-Word Plateau: ‘A Politics of the
Performative' in Derrida and Deleuze/Guattari," Critical Horizon, 4’ 2，2003, p.
251.
� Jacque Derrida, Without Alibi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p.
207.
142 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor the truth" (257).® As demonstrated in the specific case of Tripmaster Monkey, minority writing as a speech act for political resistance, despites its revolutionary force of performative utterance, is likely to be still confined by the boundaries of its book jackets.
‘Although Austin, Derrida and Butler all use the term "perfoimativity" and "iterability" (only used by Derrida and Butler), the meaning of these terms can be explained respectively in their own contexts.
For Austin: Austin defines "performatives" as follows: (1) Performative utterances are not true or false, that is, not truth-evaluable; instead when something is wrong with them then they are
"happy" or "unhappy". (2) The uttering of a performative is, or is part of, the doing of a certain kind of action (Austin later deals with them under the name illocutionary acts), the performance of which, again, would not normally be described as just "saying" or "describing" something (cf. Austin 1962,
5).
Derrida speaks of "iterability" throughout his works. What Derrida stresses by using the word
"iterability" is that it points to the possibility of repeating utterances, writings and other forms of communication over and over again in many different contexts, which allows them to have different meanings or at least to be interpreted differently. This idea is closely associated with Foucault.
According to Michel Foucault, the act of writing is the creation of a "space into which the writing subject constantly disappears." (Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, New York:
Pantheon Books，1984，102.) If the author becomes insignificant, then the meaning of a text can shift and be reinterpreted, taken apart and examined for implied meanings.
Butler's idea on iterability/ performativity invokes from several different theoretical approaches, such as Althusser's scenario of "interpellation," Austin's "perlocutionary" speech act, Derrida's concept of "iterability" and Foucault's "discursive formation." Butler concerns herself with the category of hate speech and its treatment in the courts in order to procure concrete examples for her performativity theory. In Bodies That Matter, Butler seeks to clear up readings and misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice. Therefore, she emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability.
Ibid.，p. 203.
143 Chapter Three: Return to the Minor
2 See Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book for a detailed description of Chinese as an underprivledged, "unqualifiable," "unrelated" group of people: "They were flimflammers of tourists, wildcat miners, cigar makers without the white label, carriers of lords without deeds, kangaroo jurists, medical and legal practitioners without degrees, unconvertible pagans and heathens, gamblers with
God and one another, aliens unqualifiable to apply for citizenship, unrelated communalists and crowders into single-dwellings, dwellers and gamblers in the backs of stores, restaurateurs and launderers who didn't pass health inspections, droppers of garbage into other people's cans, payers and takers of less than minimum wage, founders of martial-arts schools with wall certificates from the
Shaolin Temple of Hunan, China, but no accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and
Colleges, Unemployment-check collectors, dodgers of the draft of several countries, un-Americans, red-hot communists, unbridled capitalists, look-alike of japs and Viet Cong, unlicensed manufacturers and exploders of fireworks. Everybody with aliases. More than one hundred and eight outlaws
(301-302).
144 Conclusion
Conclusion
The thing is, I became more and more aware of the possibility of
distinguishing between becoming and history. ...Nietzsche is talking about
the way things happen, about events themselves or becoming. What history
grasps in an event is the way it's actu-alized in particular circumstances; the
event's becoming is beyond the scope of history. ...Becoming isn't part of
history; history amounts only the set of preconditions, however recent, that
one leaves behind in order to "become," that is, to create something new.
This is precisely what Nietzsche calls the Untimely.®
--Gilles Deleuze
Deleuze and Guattari said: "there is nothing major or revolutionary except the minor." They further encourage their readers to "create a becoming minor.”�
Moreover, they propose several important relating theories/concepts: For instance
"becoming," "deterriolization" and etc. I would like to argue that these theories and concepts provide a very inspiring path for further and overall comprehension of
� Gilles Deleuze. Conversation with Toni Negri Futur Anterieur 1 (Spring 1990).
Trans, by Martin Joughin. http://www.generati0n-0nline.0rg/p/fpdeleuze3.htm
� Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, "Minor Literature: Kafka," The Deleuze
Reader (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993), pp. 163-64.
145 Conclusion
Kingston's tendency of resistance to Langue. Therefore, in conclusion, I would like to employ these theories/concepts to summarize the various aspects of Kingston's resistance to langue with reference to the return to the parole, the body and the minor, and identify in particular its value and significance.
(1) Kingston's resistance to Langue tendency is essentially a basic appeal to
Becoming that resists homogeneity yet embraces difference. Such an inclination coincides with Western queries of being and anti-Logocentrism trends dating from
Nietzsche's time.
In Deleuze's philosophy of difference, the concept of "becoming" is of utmost importance： He takes up Nietzsche's idea that being is becoming-there is an internal self-differing within the different itself. "Becoming produces nothing other than itself.
We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself."® For Deleuze and Guattari, "becoming is creation"®；
"becoming is involutionary, involution is creative.，，�
In Kingston's writing, what one sees is indeed a case that satisfies Deleuze and
Guattari's description: To return to the parole, to the body or to the minor could all be read as an opposition against linguistic/literary/cultural/ideological homogeneity, a pursuit for difference in terms of language usage, literary expression and cultural
� Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)，p. 238.
� Ibid.，p. 106.
� Ibid.，p. 239.
146 Conclusion values. Therefore, Kingston's writing is essentially a revolt to langue/Langue that is isomorphic with being, with homogeneity as its basis and representation; an appeal to parole, body and minor that is related to becoming with difference as its source and destination as well. In this sense, Kingston's resistance to Langue writing process is indeed a process of becoming an individual Kingston.
(2) Becoming-Minor is the essential driving force and appeal of Kingston's resistance to Langue tendency.
Deleuze and Guattari once said that "all becoming is minoritarian" and the minoritarian is "a becoming or a process."® Langue in Saussurean sense is of isomorphic nature with not only "identities" but also "majority"; parole and body correspondingly share consistency with "difference"' and "minority."^ From this perspective, the return to parole/body is indeed a return to the minor. But a necessary question must be raised— what is the drive of this force of returning? I argue that the answer lies in Kingston's innate desire as an individual-woman-ethnic minority, an inborn desire that calls for more difference and minorness.
In Desire & Pleasure, Deleuze points out:
Desire does not comprise any lack; neither is it a natural given; it is but
one with an assemblage of heterogeneous elements which function; it is
process, in contrast with structure or genesis; it is affect, as opposed to
feeling; it is "haecceity" (individuality of a day, a season, a life), as opposed
to subjectivity; it is event, as opposed to thing or person. And above all it
� Ibid., p. 291.
147 Conclusion
implies the constitution of a field of immanence.®
In this sense, the generative/creative nature derives from desire and generates only minomess. This is of innate consistency with Kingston writing as a resistance to
Langue. In other words, Kingston's resistance to Langue is essentially driven by desire with the creation of minor as its orientation. Kingston and her writings are multi-marginalized in terms of ethnicity, gender and dominant discourse as well as in cultural and psychological perspectives. I’ however, see these types of marginality, this so-called minorness, as an obtained process than an existing characteristic. In
Kingston's work as I have discussed in this thesis, whether it is an ethnographical
Asian American autobiography or an adoption of Chinese legends and myths {The
Woman Warrior), an historical account of a minority group's forsaken past {China
Men) or a fictional representation of communal ideals {The Tripmaster Monkey), there exists consistently an inner movement of "becoming-minor" (which also includes a series of sub-becomings: "becoming-minority," "becoming-female," and so on) impelled by a "minor desire — one of the crucial drives in such a process. In other words, the minorness of this specific writing is not something that has always existed within the "Langue" or universal world structure and order, but is rather something that derives from Kingston's individual minor-desire and is formed in the process of becoming.
3. Deterriolization is Kingston's basic means of returning to parole, to the body, to the minor. It is indeed in this process of deterriolization that Kingston's
� Gilles Deleuze, Desire & Pleasure, notes on Foucault, 1997, Chapter G
http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/visarts/globe/issue5/delfou.html>>.
148 Conclusion language/literary expression achieves the significance and possibility of resistance to langue.
Deterritorialization^ is a concept created by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in
Anti-Oedipus (1972), which has been quickly adopted by other critics and in turn bestowed with various levels of derivative meanings. In a broader context, deterritorialization is concerned with disrupting "traditional structures of expression," while reterritorialization reinforces traditional structures.� In this sense, the essence and process of deterritorialization is resistance to structure and
Langue the call to perpetually deterritorialize language is a challenging demand to resist the lure of hegemony, that is, to resist becoming major•� It also associates closely with the issue of language and literary creation and the generation of minorness--"Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency."�
Deleuze and Guattari also outline the three characterizing elements of a "minor literature": (1) the deterritorializations of a major language through a minor literature
� Paul Delaney, Decolonization and the Minor Writer. Postcolonial Forum. January
2001. 20and%20Guattari.pdf> � Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, "Minor Literature: Kafka," The Deleuze Reader (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1993)，pp. 163-64. ® Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 11. 149 Conclusion written in the major language from a marginalized or minoritarian position; (2) the thoroughly political nature of a "minor literature"; (3) and its collective, enunciative value.® As minor literature, Kingston's work as I have discussed above demonstrates in many ways these three characterizing elements of "a minor literature"; these features are closely connected with Kingston's deterriorializing means and strategies of returning to the parole, the body and the minor. In her attempt to return to the parole, Kingston deterritorializes boundaries that are determined by Langue/langue in English and Chinese language and related cultures. In her attempt to return to the body, Kingston further deterritorializes the non-body elements, such as Law/law, System, racial prejudice and societal ideologies guided by majority/male. These elements alienate subject (human) and silence the body. It is through such an act of returning to the body, the body is able to speak and lead to further deterritorialization of boundaries demarcated by the Symbolic system. Through all of the forms of minorness that Kingston uses to resist the majority, and eventually in the process of deterriolization, Kingston's resistance to Langue obtains a new kind of multiplicity and difference in the midst of multi-differences between East-West, male-female, history-reality, and truth-illusion. It echoes what Deleuze and Guattari said in their analysis of Kafka-it is only through a process of constantly deterritorializing reterritorialized language that writers can create "the revolutionary conditions for � Jana Evans Braziel, Notes on "What is a Minor Literature" from Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, http://www.umass.edu/complit/aclanet/janadele.htm 150 Conclusion every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature.，’� ‘Deleuze's main philosophical project in his early works (i.e., those prior to his collaborations with Guattari) can be baldly summarized as a systematic inversion of the traditional metaphysical relationship between identity and difference. Traditionally, difference is seen as derivative from identity: e.g., to say that "X is different from Y" assumes some X and Y with at least relatively stable identities. To the contrary, Deleuze claims that all identities are effects of difference. Identities are not logically or metaphysically prior to difference, Deleuze argues, "given that there exist differences of nature between things of the same genus." That is, not only are no two things ever the same, the categories we use to identify individuals in the first place derive from differences. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze) 2 Gilles Deleuze: The difference between minorities and majorities isn't their size. A minority may be bigger than a majority. What defines the majority is a model you have to conform to: the average European adult male city-dweller, for example ... A minority, on the other hand, has no model, it's a becoming, a process. One might say the majority is nobody. Everybody's caught, one way or another, in a minority becoming that would lead them info unknown paths if they opted to follow it through. When a 'minority creates models for itself, it's because it wants to become a majority, and probably has to, to survive or prosper (to have a state, be recognized, establish its rights, for example). But its power comes from what it's managed to create, which to some extent goes into the model, but doesn't depend on it. A people is always a creative minority, and remains one even when it acquires a majority^ it can be both at once because the two things aren't lived out on the same plane. It's the greatest artists (rather than populist artists) who invoke a people, and find they "lack a people": Mallarme, Rimbaud, Klee, Berg. The Straubs in cinema. Artists can only invoke a people, their need for one goes to the very heart of what they're doing, it's not their job to create one, and they can't. Art is resistance: it resists death, slavery, infamy, shame. But a people can't worry about art. How is a people created, through what terrible suf-fering? When a people's created, it's through its own resources, but in away that links up with something in art (Garrel says there's a mass of terrible suffering in the Louvre, too) or links up art to what it lacked. Utopia isn't the right concept: it's more a question of a "tabulation" in which a people and art both share. We ought to take up Bergson's notion of tabulation and give it a political meaning. (Gilles Deleuze: Conversation with Toni Negri Futur Anterieur 1,Spring 1990, translated by Martin Joughin. � Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987)，p. 154. 151 Conclusion http://www.generati0n-0nline.0rg/p/fpdeleuze3.htm) Deleuze and Guattari use deterritorialization to designate the freeing of labor-power from specific means of production. They distinguished in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) a relative deterritorialisation and an absolute one ("Earth"). 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